routledge approaches to history history, memory, and state … · 2014-12-27 · routledge...

Routledge Approaches to History

Im prisoned by HistoryAspects of Historicized LifeMartin Davies

2 Narrative Projections of aBlack British HistoryEva Ulrike Pirker

3 Integrity in Historical ResearchEdited by Tony Gibbons andEmily Sutherland

4 History, Memory, andState-Sponsored ViolenceTime and JusticeBerber Bevernage

History, Memory, andState-Sponsored ViolenceTime and Justice

Berber Bevernage

i~ ~~o~~!~~~~upNEW YORK LONDON

First published 2012by Routledge711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Simultaneously published in the UKby Routledge2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

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The right of Berber Bevemage to be identified as author of this workhas been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of theCopyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced orutilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, nowknown or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or inany information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writingfrom the pub! ishers.

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Bevernage, Berber.History, memory, and state-sponsored violence: time and justice I

Berber Bevernage.p. cm. - (Routledge approaches to history; 4)

Includes hibliographical references and index.I. Terrorism-Government policy. 2. Victims. 3. Historiography.

1. Title.HV6431.B49142011303.6--dc222011011704

[SBN 13: 978-0-415-88340-5 (hbk)ISBN 13: 978-0-203-80356-1 (ebk)

Dedicated to Shanan Galan and the many other'social desaparecidos' in the Fortress of Europe.

Contents

PrefaceAcknowledgments

1 Introduction

PART I

IX

XI

2 'La Muerte No Existe.' The Madres de Plaza de Mayo andthe Resistance against the Irreversible Time of History 23

3 'We the Victims and Survivors Declare the Past to Be in thePresent.' The 'New South Africa' and the Legacy of Apartheid 46

4 'The Past Must Remain the Past.' Time of History andTime of Justice in the 'New Sierra Leone' 66

Preliminary Conclusion: What Are Desaparecidosand Disturbed Ancestral SpiritsTrying to Tell Us About History? 83

PART 11

5 A Hard Time Thinking the Irrevocable. Why It Is SoDifficult to Understand the Haunting Past

6 Searching for Other Times. Some Critiques of theAbsent and Distant Past

91

110

VIIJ Contents

7 Spectral Times. Jacques Derrida and the PrefaceDeconstruction of Time 131

8 History and the Work of Mourning 147

Conclusion 168

Notes 177Bibliography 217Index 241

This book is centered around a series of simple but provocative theses:that the way one deals with historical injustice and the ethics of historyis strongly dependent on the way one conceives of historical time, thatthe concepts of time traditionally used by historians are structurally morecompatible with the perpetrators' than the victims' point of view, and thatbreaking with this structural bias demands a fundamental rethinking ofthe dominant modern notions of history and historical time.

When I started working on the doctoral research that forms the basis ofthis book, my plan was to focus on the practical use of history outside ofacademic historiography by focusing on the so-called field of 'transitionaljustice,' and more specifically on the context of 'truth commissions', suchas they have been set up to reckon with the legacy of the military junta inArgentina, the Apartheid era in South Africa, and the civil war in SierraLeone. Little did I know that studying the practical use of history wouldlead me into a philosophical journey in which I would ultimately cometo question some of the basic assumptions that I took for granted as atrained historian.

Two insights made me decide that a more philosophical approach wasnecessary. First I came to see that the truth commissions' interest in history was much harder to explain than I originally expected: It could notbe reduced to a search for historical truth, it was not merely a matter ofborrowing the historians' methodology, and sometimes it even could not beunderstood in terms of an opposition between remembrance and oblivion.Second, I was surprised to find out that the truth commissions met withpopular protest that could not entirely be attributed to matters of amnesry,reparations, or conflicting visions of historical truth. I became convincedthat, on a more profound level, both the truth commissions' interest inhistory and the popular protests against them were related to different concepts of time, to different interpretations of the relation among past, present, and future.

One of the most fundamental challenges to the traditional conceptualizations of historical time doubtlessly lies in the often repeated claim ofvictims that the past haunts the present. Studying such different, sometimes

even counterintuitive, concepts of time, I developed two central hypotheses:firstly, that indeed the delineation between past and present is not absoluteand the past sometimes persists in the present; and secondly, that discoursesof history, rather than being neutral descriptions of past and present, oftenmanifest a dimension of 'performativity,' by which they actively establish abreak or temporal 'distance' between past and present.

After scrutinizing the practical relevance of the uses of historical discourse and the resistance against them in the context of transitional justice,I dedicate the second part of the book to a philosophical inquiry into thequestions of why it so hard for most academic historians to take seriouslythe notion of the haunting or persisting past, and of what kind of alternative chronosophy would be better suited to do so.

I would like to think of this book as a contribution to the theory ofhistory, albeit an unorthodox one. Unorthodox because it does not focuson professional historiography; it does not go into questions of truth,objectivity, or narativism; but mostly, this book differs from conventionalphilosophy of history because it tries to draw the attention to some longneglected 'big questions' about the historical condition-questions abouthistorical time, the unity of history, and the ontological status of presentand past-and because it is openly programmatic in its plea for a new historical ethics.

I am aware that big questions do not come without big risks. However, Ihope that I will be able to convince the readers that raising these questionsis not a matter of sterile sophistry, but that it has a real social relevance.

Acknowledgments

Writing this book has taken me along a lengthy and winding road fullof bends, side-roads, and occasionally even a U-turn. At each of thesebends, side-roads, and U-turns I have encountered people who have stimulated and inspired me to go on or encouraged me to change direction. It isimpossible to name all of these persons, but let me nevertheless list somewho have been especially important in making this project possible. Asthis book evolved out of a PhD project, I first of all want to thank GitaDeneckere who supervised this project and who has always been very supportive and who granted me the freedom to shape my research the way Iwanted to. Furthermore I would like to thank Chris Lorenz, who fromearly on functioned as an informal co-supervisor and who time and againprovided me with insights that were of crucial importance to the development of my project.

Many colleagues working at many different universities have helped tomake this book possible by commenting on drafts or by inspiring me during informal conversations. I especially want to thank Wulf Kansteiner,Antoon Van den Braembussche, Antoon de Baets, Bruno De Wever, FreddyMortier, KeithJenkins, Mark Mason, Peter Icke, Henning Triiper, Chiel vanden Akker, Barbara Henkes, Marfa Ines La Greca, Veronica Tozzi, Cecilia Macon, Marfa Ines Mudrovcic, Francisco Naisthat, Nora Rabotnikof,and Eugenia Allier Montano. Antoon Van den Braembussche meticulouslystudied drafts of my manuscript and provided me with precious commentsthat gave me crucial new insights. Although I would like to thank all ofmy friends and closest colleagues for being supportive and for providing apleasant and stimulating working environment, I especially want to namethe ones who have read and commented on my drafts: Bouke Billiet, JorisVerschueren, Jan-Frederik Abbeloos, Koen Aerts, Mathias Bienstman,Maja Musi, Lore Colaert, and Martin Ottovay Jorgensen. It goes without saying that I take full responsibility for the content of this book andfor any mistakes to be found in it. Special gratitude to Lieve and Bouke,who offered their support in times of darkness at noon. Finally, I want tothank my dearest Elkovich for her endless encouragement, and especiallyfor enduring my often all-too-spectral presence.

Xll Acknowledgments

The writing of this book would not have been possible without the doctoral and post-doctoral fellowships that I was fortunate to receive from theSpecial Research Fund of the University of Ghent and from the ResearchFoundation Flanders.

1 Introduction

One wants to break free of the past: rightly, because nothing at allcan 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 verymuch alive.

T. Adorno1

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

W. Benjamin2

Several philosophers have noted the temporal dimensions of the relationbetween history and justice or ethics. The most explicitly pronounced andopposed positions in the debate undoubtedly are taken by Friedrich Nietzsche and Waiter Benjamin. For Nietzsche, history always must serve lifeand the future; it should not strive to achieve historical justice.3 Nietzschescorns the widespread 'consuming fever of history' and envies the cattlethat, fettered to the moment, live unhistorically, in contrast to humankind,which is buried by the ever-increasing burden of what is past. To be ableto live, he insists, humankind must abandon the hope for historical justiceand must learn to forget.

In contrast, Waiter Benjamin famously took an unreserved stance infavor of the innumerable victims of historical injustice still covered by thepiling wreckage of the past.4 He defends an 'anamnestic solidarity' betweenthe living and the dead, arguing that living generations should not primarily aim at the future but at preceding generations in their striving forjustice.s The living, Benjamin argues, possess a 'weak messianic power' toredress the injustices of a catastrophic past.

At the root of these opposing stances are radically different conceptionsof the past and its ontological status. Within Western modernity the relationship between history and justice generally is dominated by the idea thatthe past is absent or distant.6 This ambiguous or even inferior ontological status of the past has led several philosophers, following Nietzsche, toplead against an 'obsession' with history and to argue instead for an ethicsaimed at the present.? The idea of the past as absent or distant makes it

2 History, Memory, and State-Sponsored VIOlence

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'sability to contribute to the quest for justice, as a result, often seems verylimited or even non-existent. The close relationship between this particularconception of historical time and the restricted ethical mandate of historybecomes apparent when the former conception of time is contrasted withthe 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 propertime for justice. While the law decrees that the possibility of prosecuting andpunishing expires after a certain amount of time (with the important exception of crimes against humanity), the historian supposedly should beginwork only after a certain waiting period, often after the dead are buried andthe archives unsealed. 9 Rousso rejects this notion of a waiting period butdoes not seem to realize that the temporal antagonism between history andjustice is rooted much more deeply than appears at first sight. The conflictbetween the 'time of jurisdiction' and the 'time of history' (I refer here tohistory as a discipline or as a broader discourse) can be interpreted as anantagonism deriving from their respective emphasis on presence or absenceand with the re- or irreversibility of the event at stake. Traditionally, thediscourse of jurisdiction assumes a reversible time in which the crime is, as itwere, still wholly present and able to be reversed, annulled, or compensatedby the correct sentence and punishment. This notion of time relates to aquasi-economic logic of guilt and punishment, in which justice ultimately isunderstood as retribution and atonement. History, in contrast, traditionallyworks with what has happened and now is irretrievably gone. It stresses the'arrow of time,' thinks of time as fundamentally irreversible, and forces us torecognize the dimensions of absence and the inalterability of the past.

History's irreversible time challenges the time of jurisdiction: Retributivejustice can never be speedy enough to fully reverse or undo the damage donebecause every crime is always already partly in the past and thus always displays a dimension of absence or distance. This makes it impossible, withinhistory's concept of irreversible time, to achieve complete justice after aperiod of time has elapsed. Whoever strives for a vaster moral mandatefor history (in the name of the victims of historical injustice) will sooner orlater have to confront this concept of time. Max Horkheimer used exactlythis irreversible historical time as a fearsome weapon in his criticism of theeschatological and anamnestic philosophy of his friend Waiter Benjamin.The idea of perfect justice, according to Horkheimer, is a recurring illusionthat stems from a primitive idea of exchange. lo It is unthinkable that perfectjustice can be realized within the realm of history because even a perfectly

InlTuaUCllun .J

just society never can compensate for the misery of the past. The historical past is nichtwiedergutzumachende: '[past] injustices are over and donewith. The murdered really are murdered.'!!

The irreversible time of history is right to criticize this 'primitiveidea of exchange' that underlies the reversible time of jurisdiction. BothEmmanuel Levinas and, in his wake, Jacques Derrida have argued thatthe time of suffering and historical injustice is not quantifiable and cannot be used in a system of exchange.J2 Yet does the irreversible time ofhistory in its turn not overstate the absence or distance of the past? Doesit not neglect dimensions of persistence or haunting 'presence' of the pastand its injustices?13 The emphasis on the absence and irreversibility of thepast endows the irreversible time of history with something uncomfortable,something unjust, and something almost unacceptable in a moral sense. Itis against such an irreversible time, which 'threatens to destroy all morality,' that the Belgian-Austrian Auschwitz survivor Jean Amery rebels in hisnotorious essay 'Resentments' (1966). Amery shocked his contemporariesby pleading against forgiveness and reconciliation in favor of resentmentand by demanding a 'moral inversion' of time. He complained that: 'theentire world really does understand the young Germans' indignation at theresentful prophets of hate, and firmly sides with those to whom the futurebelongs. Future is obviously a value concept. What will be tomorrow ismore valuable than what was yesterday.' Amery encouraged resentment butrealized that its backward temporal orientation is in conflict with some ofthe most dominant ideas concerning the irreversible nature of time:

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

Still, as a captive of the 'moral truth,' Amery demands a right of resistanceagainst what he calls the anti-moral 'biological' time that heals all wounds:

What happened, happened. This sentence is just as true as it is hostileto morals and intellect. [... ] The moral person demands annulmentof time-in the particular case by nailing the criminal to his deed.Thereby, and through a moral turning-back of the clock, the latter canjoin his victim as a fellow human beingY

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

Amery is right, of course, when he admits the absurdity of trying to undowhat has been done. However, I want to take seriously his complaints about

4 History, Memory, and State-Sponsored VtOlence

the a- or even immoral character of irreversible time-seriously enough totake his complaint as one of the prime motivations for this book and tocriticize and attempt to rethink this notion of time. Yet, how does onerethink the irreversible time of history with its stress on the distant or theabsent without digressing into the mythical reversibility of the time of jurisdiction? How, indeed, is it possible to conceive of a third way, scrupulouslyresisting both poles of the dichotomous opposition of the reversible and theirreversible, or of the present present and the absent past?

A good starting point can be found in the work of the French philosopherVladimir JankeIevitch. In one of his philosophical masterpieces on time andtemporality, Jankelevitch introduces an analytical distinction between whathe calls the 'irreversible' and the 'irrevocable.'16 Although both, accordingto Jankelevitch, are dimensions of the same temporal process, they refer totwo radically different experiences of the past. The irreversible, a havingtaken-place (avoir-eu-lieu) that should primarily be deciphered as a having-been (avoir-ete), 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 pastas irreversible if they experience it as fragile and as immediately dissolving or fleeting from the present. They experience the past as irrevocable ifthey experience it as a persistent and massive depository that sticks to thepresent. Both experiences of the past, however, according to Jankelevitch,relate to an inverse impossibility: to either revisit a lost past or expel animportunate past; to bring an all-too-past past (un passe trop passe) intothe present or banish an all-too-present past (un passe trop present) fromthat present.1

?

JankeIevitch's analytic distinction is of great relevance because theconcept of the irrevocable enables us to escape the seemingly compellingdichotomies we discussed above. Surely the irrevocable temporal experience, much like the irreversible time of history, stresses the inalterabilityof the past-what could it mean to call something irrevocable if not in thefirst place that it can never be revoked-but, in contrast to the irreversibletime of history, it does not condemn that past to an inferior ontologicalstatus that facilitates its neglect. By referring to a past that got 'stuck' andpersists into the present, the concept of the irrevocable indeed breaks withthe idea of a 'temporal distance' between the present and the past that is socentral in the irreversible time of history. Moreover, the irrevocable defiesthe 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 irrevocableshould never be confused with the metaphysical notion of presence, whichfunctions as the antonym of absence because that would lead to logicalinconsistencies. 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 logicalinconsistencies or absurdities-such as the idea of 'backward causation'or the denial of 'path dependence.'18 In other words, the perspective of theirrevocable offers a great opportunity to criticize the irreversible time ofhistory and to scrutinize the viability of an alternative chronosophy thatwould challenge the conception of the past as a 'dead' matter that is absentor 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 anddistance; rather, it blurs the strict delineation between past and presentand thereby even questions the existence of these temporal dimensionsas separate entities. Therefore, I hope the reflection on the notion of theirrevocable will provoke us to rethink or reconsider two simple but fundamental questions: what does it actually mean for something or someone tobe 'past,' and how do things, persons, or events become past? It strikes methat historians hardly ever (Michel de Certeau seems an important exception) explicitly raise this question about the peculiar 'transition' betweenpresent and past. Let us, then, briefly reconsider Henry Rousso's commentabout the 'waiting period' that has long been and still often is recommended to historians. Does not this long-standing taboo on the writingof 'contemporary' history-more than being merely a result of a practical problem relating to closed archives or the fear to work with lackof enough hindsight-primarily signal exactly this: a taboo on any practice that could bring up the tangled question of the (ontological) limitsseparating past and present and the living and the dead? Or formulatedslightly differently, does not the relatively recent crumbling of the taboo oncontemporary history and the increasing popularity of writing on an evermore 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' breakor distance between past and present?I9 Does the past, as Chris Lorenzbeautifully formulates it, have any 'natural half-life' as if it were a portionof depleted uranium?20 Can a genuinely 'contemporary' history be basedon the same (implicit) notions of time and temporality that for so longmade many academic historians believe that they worked with a past thatis 'dead' or 'gone'? Because they are so closely related to the notion of theirrevocable, these questions will accompany us (although often remainingimplicit) throughout the entire book.

Sadly, Jankelevitch prematurely aborts the promising opening offered bythe notion of the irrevocable almost immediately after he has stated the latter's existence as a category of experience. Jankelevitch hurries to stress themerely metaphorical or subjective character of the idea that the irrevocablepast 'survives' in the present. In reality, Jankelevitch claims, all time movesconstantly in one direction, and the persistence of the past into the present

6 History, Memory, and State-Sponsored Violence

thus can be only a distorted experience of what in reality is a process ofirreversible becoming. Still, despite this premature abortion, Jankelevitchhas presented us with a name for the alternative chronosophy that I want toscrutinize. In the following parts and chapters, I will analyze and criticizethe (use of the) notion of irreversible historical time, and I will try to defendthe consistence, the feasibility, and the ethical significance of the notion ofthe irrevocable.

THE TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE DILEMMA, TRUTHCOMMISSIONS, AND THE RIGHT TO HISTORICAL TRUTH

How better to study the history-time-ethics triad than by looking at a context in which it is put into 'practice'? The debate on the temporal dimensions of ethics that we have discussed above by referring to the conflictingstances of thinkers like Nietzsche, Benjamin, Horkheimer, and Amery hasrelatively recently (re)appeared on the international political stage with fullstrength and high urgency in the emerging field of transitional justice.

Transitional justice can be described with the words of Ruti Teitel as 'theconception of justice associated with periods of political change, characterized by legal responses to confront the wrongdoings of repressive predecessor regimes.'21 The need for societies in transition to reckon with violentlegacies of dictatorship or civil war is of course not new. Focusing on transitional justice from a historical perspective, Jon Elster has claimed that itsexistence can be drawn back at least to 411 and 403 BC, when the Athenians had to restore democracy twice after it was overthrown by oligarchs.Elster also furnishes his transitional justice 'universe' with cases from theseventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, including the restorationof the monarchy in England after the Declaration of Breda (1660), the restoration of the monarchy in France after the fall of Napoleon (twice, in1814 and 1815), and the transition to independence after the Anglo-American treaty of 1783. 22 The origins of modern transitional justice, accordingto Ruti Teitel, could be situated in the aftermath of the First World War, butshe argues that it only became understood as both extraordinary and international in the period after 1945. This delimitation enables her to draw athree-phase genealogy of transitional justice, in which the first 'post-warphase' associated with the Nuremberg trials is followed by a second 'postCold War phase' associated with the democratic transitions of the late1980s, which in its turn toward the end of the twentieth century has beenreplaced by a third 'steady-state phase' of transitional justice 'associatedwith contemporary conditions of persistent conflict which lay the foundation for a normalized law of violence.'23

When talking about transitional justice, most scholars only have thesemore recent second and third phases in mind, and the phenomenon is mostoften (implicitly) taken to include only transitions to democracy.24 In the

Introduction 7

last quarter of the twentieth century, as several commentators have noted,something like a 'tidal wave of new democracies' or a 'heady wave of liberalisation' has occurred in countries that were emerging from an authoritarian and often violent pastY The 'wave' apparently began in southernEurope with the transitions in Greece and Spain; soon headed for LatinAmerica, where countries such as Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Brazil, andUruguay all emerged from military dictatorships; later turned to EasternEurope, where Poland, Eastern Germany, and Hungary broke with theircommunist regimes; and most recently has taken an almost global dimension with the fall of Apartheid in South Africa, peace processes in otherparts of Africa, and things starting to move in Asian countries such asCambodia, East Timor, and South Korea. 26

If transitional justice deserves to be named as a specific branch of justicein comparison with other more 'ordinary' forms of criminal justice andsocial justice, it is first and foremost because the context of political andsocial transition creates a specific set of constraints that make the use of the'orthodox' repertoire of justice mechanisms very difficult. This is especiallythe case when transitions do not follow a clear cut (military) victory by a(democratic) successor regime but, instead, result from a negotiated revolution or settlement between the old and the new forces. In these situationswith a precarious balance of power, in which the old elite retains greatpolitical or economical influence and in which military and security forceskeep threatening peace or political stability, it is hard to set up trials orresort to a straightforward application of criminallawY Sometimes judgesor prosecutors receive death threats, and often witnesses are still too frightened to show up in court. A lack of socio-economic stability also can makeit difficult for countries emerging from situations of massive human rightsviolations to bear the huge costs of a mass trial with a virtual guarantee ofnumerous legal obstacles including the lack of sufficient evidence if the perpetrators found the opportunity to destroy incriminating documents. AsAlex Boraine puts it: 'There are enormous difficulties in pursuing justice ina normal situation, but when one attempts to do this in countries undergoing transitions, the problems are intensified. There is a need to balance twoimperatives: on the one hand, there is the need to return to the rule of lawand the prosecution of offenders: on the other, there is a need for rebuildingsocieties and embarking on the process of reconciliation.'28

Because these two imperatives often seem opposed, commentators havespoken about a 'devil's choice'29 or a 'transitional justice dilemma'30: torepair historical injustice and thereby risk social dissent, destabilization,and return of violence; or to aim at a democratic and peaceful present andfuture to the 'disadvantage' of the victims of a grim past? The human rightsactivist Juan Mendez refers to the dilemma as 'one of the hardest choicesthat any democracy has to make,' and he disapprovingly adds that the longing for reconciliation and nation building all too often has led to a 'forgiveand-forget policy.'31 Similarly another commentator rhetorically puts the


question as follows: 'What, then, shall we choose? A peace built upon thepublic suppression of the victim's memories, or a justice that risks bringingwar back to life again?'32

Predictably, most perpetrators of injustices choose the first option, whichthey often advocate in the name of the future and of national reconciliation. Augusto Pinochet, for example, attempted to prevent a public exposure of the violent past for which he himself was responsible by adopting acynically voluntarist discourse that stressed the importance of progress andnation building. 'Both sides should forget,' he claimed, 'we must continueworking for Chile, for our republic; we should not look back. Let's notallow this country to become a third-class nation but a second- or first-classone if possible. But to achieve that it is necessary to be intelligent, capable,and to have the ability to forget.'33 Similarly, F. W. De Klerk in South Africaafter the fall of Apartheid stated that: 'The best way to reconcile would beto say: Let's close the book of the past, let's really forgive and let's now startlooking at the future.'34

Conscious forgetting and the subordination of retrospective justice to apresent- and future-oriented policy has also been defended more sincerelyin the name of democracy and emancipation by people with less questionable credits. The American political philosopher, Jean Bethke Elshtain, forexample, defends the resort to a 'knowing forgetting' in situations wherenations or groups are held hostage to a burdened past and are in great need ofthe 'drama of forgiveness.' 'People,' she writes, 'are very fond of citing Santayana's claim that those who don't know their history are doomed to repeatit. But perhaps the reverse is more likely, namely, that it is those who knowtheir history too well who are doomed to repetition.'35 A similar positionis defended by Bruce Ackerman. Given the particular combination of highmoral capital with a low bureaucratic capacity that often characterizes youngdemocracies, moral capital, according to Ackerman, is better spent on constitutional ordering than on corrective justice. If given full play, the demand forjustice, Ackerman warns, can threaten the development of a liberal democracy. Moreover he adds: 'There can be no hope of comprehensively correcting the wrongs done over a generation or more. A few crude, bureaucraticallyfeasible reforms will do more justice, and prove less divisive, than a quixoticquest after the mirage of corrective justice.'36 What then to do with the 'stinking carcasses' that are often still left in the official archives (e.g., the Stasi filesin East Germany), Ackerman rhetorically asks, and providing his own answerhe radically states: 'Burn them, I say. If the files remain, members of the newgovernment will be tempted to use them to blackmail the opposition. '37 If astrong constitutional foundation is built, the terrors of the past in his viewwill become no more than 'a grim but distant memory.'38

Until fairly recently, a combination of amnesia and amnesty indeed historically prevailed as the most commonly used antidote against a painfulpast brought on by violent internal conflict. It is important to stress thefact that, despite the well-known exception of the Nuremberg trials where

lntroaUcTton '::J

an external power came to prosecute the perpetrators and the exceptionalcase of Greece where the Colonels were swiftly prosecuted after a militarydefeat, retrospective justice is very rare when injustices are committed bystate actors. 39 As Carlos Santiago Nino, one of the main architects of transitional justice in Argentina, writing in 1996, remarks: 'In surveying thehistory of the criminal law when applied to massive human rights violations, we find blanket amnesties or pardons, widespread silence, and failureto prosecute anyone.'40 Similarly, another commentator notes that wars,amnesties, and oblivion often come together: 'If violent conflict providesan irregular heartbeat to human co-existence, amnesties come to lightenthe burden.'41 Historically, Timothy Garton Ash claims, the 'advocates offorgetting' have come in great number and have been of considerable influence.42 From the treaty of Lothar in 851 to the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923,many peace treaties in European history have included acts that orderedforgetting. Even since 1945, Garton Ash writes, much of post-war WesternEuropean democracy was constructed on a foundation of forgetting. Aslate as 1975, he remarks, Spain made its transition to democracy with aconscious policy of forgetting.

Since the early 1980s, however, things have been changing. Althoughthe need for amnesty often remains, it has become more subtle or conditional, and the language of oblivion has almost entirely disappeared fromthe political vocabulary.43 A 'cultural turn' in political theory made it mandatory that even in situations where political constraints exclude the viability of retributive justice, the past should not be left behind and the burdenof history should be addressed.44 The need to manage the legacy of violentpasts revealed itself as a major policy issue: As a commentator notes, 'thereseems to be a growing consensus that the past demands something from usin situations of transition.'45

In an attempt to find a pragmatic solution to the transitional justicedilemma that would seem less provocative toward perpetrators than theidea of criminal prosecutions, while not completely ignoring the sufferingof victims, legal experts have developed the formula of the 'truth commission': semi-judicial bodies that, in contrast to criminal courts or war tribunals, cannot sentence or punish but offer an officially sanctioned 'truthtelling' as an alternative.

Although they have been given many different names, several dozensof these truth commissions have functioned internationally during the lastthree decades.46 Except for a dysfunctional commission of inquiry on thefate of the disappeared people established by Idi Amin Dada in Uganda in1974, the first real experiments with the formula of the truth commissiontook place in Latin America during the early 1980s. After the establishment in 1982 of a Bolivian commission that disbanded without submittinga final report, important pioneering work was done in 1984 by the Argentine Comision Nacional sabre la Desaparicion de Personas (CONADEP). Ayear later a similar commission on the disappeared was set up in Uruguay,

10 History, Memory, and State-Sponsored VIOlence

and from this moment on truth commissions were established in countriesall over the world, including Zimbabwe, Uganda (for a second time), Nepal,Chile, Chad, Germany, El Salvador, Sri Lanka, Haiti, Burundi, South Africa,Ecuador, Guatemala, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Paraguay, Peru, East Timor, theDemocratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, and Kenya.

Of all these cases, the commission with the most extensive mandate andthe greatest international influence was the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) set up in South Africa in 1995. It was the first truth commission to hold public hearings and function in a highly transparent way. Byattracting an enormous amount of domestic and international media andscholarly attention, the South African TRC came to function as a standardfor all the following truth commissions, promoting the formula of the truthcommission as the mandatory 'staple of the transitional justice menu.'47 Asone scholar notes, since the advent of the South African TRC, it is hard tothink of any political or post-conflict transition where the idea of establishing a truth commission has not been contemplated.48

The South African TRC also was one of the first truth commissionsto self-consciously state that the revelation of historical truth can be considered as an adequate alternative form of justice.49 What started out asa political compromise in an attempt to escape the Scylla and Charybdisof the transitional justice dilemma thus eventually came to be seen as animportant legal innovation. Despite the fact that the emphasis on 'truth' inthe early commissions was primarily a pragmatic move for which a rationale was later sought, the truth commissions following the South AfricanTRC generally do not merely argue that they are a second-best alternativebut, rather, insist that they can accomplish things that cannot be providedby traditional courts. 50 Telling the truth about the past is believed to behighly instrumental in reaching the goal of social peace and the restorationof civic trust in wounded nations because, according to one of its mainadvocates, 'a society cannot reconcile itself on the grounds of a dividedmemory.'51 'Truth' moreover increasingly has been considered an 'absolute,unrenounceable value,'52 and as Luc Huyse remarks, recent truth commissions are based on the idea that the remembrance of the truth brings with itthe supreme or ultimate form of justice.53 Instead of being a trade off thatsacrifices the pursuit of justice for the sake of political stability, as somescholars argue,54 advocates of truth commissions state that the innovativelegal concepts of 'truth as acknowledgement' and 'justice as recognition,'bridge the tensions between truth and justice and provide a moral legitimization for these commissions. 55 Partly under the impulse of the truthcommissions, the idea of an inalienable 'right to truth' has increasinglyemerged as an established part of international law. 56 In the words of UNspecial rapporteur, Louis Joinet:

This is not simply the right of any individual victim or his nearest anddearest to know what happened, a right to the truth. The right to know

InlTUUUl-uun 11

is also a collective right, drawing upon history to prevent violationsfrom recurring in the future. Its corollary is a 'duty to remember' onthe part of the State: to be forearmed against the perversions of historythat go under the names of revisionism or negationism, for the historyof its oppression is part of a people's national heritage and as such mustbe preserved.57

TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE, THE CRISIS OF MODERN TIMECONSCIOUSNESS, AND THE PROJECT OF SIMULTANEITY

It goes without saying that the recent emergence of truth commissions andthe development of the legal concept of a 'right to truth' are of great relevance to historians. With the increasing popularity of the formula of thetruth commission as a kind of hybrid situated at the intersection betweenhistory and jurisdiction, historical discourse moves center stage in the ethico-political management of the collective past. In fact, in the whole fieldof transitional justice, the once well-guarded borders separating historyand jurisdiction have become vague and permeable. Legal scholars havestarted to ponder the ability and desirability of war tribunals to serve ashistory lessons that would teach citizens about democratic values or civicskills, 58 and some historians have begun to mobilize their discipline in support of conflict management and reconciliation. 59 Ruti Teitel speaks aboutthe emergence of 'transitional historical justice' as an autonomous practicethat can be placed next to criminal justice, reparatory justice, administrative justice, and constitutional justice.60

Yet, in order to understand the concrete relation between history andethics or justice, it has to be asked what history, or historical discourse,is actually 'doing' (or expected to do) in the field of transitional justice.Why, exactly, do so many countries in transition recently turn to historicaltruth in order to attain national unity and reconciliation, ironically ascribing benevolent properties to it that closely resemble those once associatedwith collective forgetting? Why, indeed, has the once dominant 'no-actionoption'61 almost completely lost credit as a viable way to deal with burdened pasts, and why does almost nobody believe in the option of oblivionany longer?

In order to answer these questions, I propose to analyze the function ofhistory, or rather of a particular discourse on history, in the field of transitional justice from the perspective of a politics of time-'a politics whichtakes the temporal structures of social practices as the specific objects ofits transformative (or preservative) intent.'62 I argue that the truth commissions' turn to history and the recent international preoccupation withrepairing and apologizing for historical injustices-which observers havedescribed as the upsurge of a 'neo-enlightenment morality,'63 a 'fin de millenaire fever of atonement,'64 or a globalized 'politics of regret'65-should


primarily be seen as a reaction to a changing regime d'historicite, to use aconcept coined by the French historian Frans:ois Hartog. 66

As long as one remains stuck in the modernist dichotomy of a 'living'present and an ontologically inferior absent or distant past, the only reasonable way out of the transitional justice dilemma-given the difficultyof falling back on the traditional legal repertoire of criminal justice andgiven the fear of a divisive remembrance-indeed seems to lie in a combination of amnesty and amnesia. The stress on irreversible historical timeindirectly promotes an attitude of letting 'bygones be bygones' whenevervictims or relatives cannot achieve justice immediately after crimes arecommitted. However, I will claim that a seeming 'failure' of the modernconsciousness of time has resulted in a profoundly altered relation to thepast. In this context, the option of a collective amnesia has lost credit notonly because it is deemed unjust but also because it is no longer consideredadequate as a tool for putting the past to rest. Mere oblivion, it seems, willno longer do.

The substantial policy change relating to past wrongdoings during thelast decades could be described as related to a loss of trust in the workings of time or 'temporal decay' as an automatic pacifier that brings aboutsome kind of 'simili-forgiveness' in the long run. 67 During the high daysof modernity, time in the West was generally experienced as somethingthat was both progressing and erasing. This idea was tellingly expressed byVladimir Jankelevitch when he stated that 'innovation actualises noveltyby draining the overabundance of memories, by favouring the deflationof the memory.'6~ In the context of this time consciousness, the amnesiaoption-whether as a product of passive forgetting, amnesty, or a rigorous destruction of records-could be defended as a form of naturalism,merely confirming what time would do by itself anyway. Although an overspill of recollection could slow or weigh down the elan of progress slightly,most were confident that the direction of time cannot be reversed and thatnobody can move against its current. The melancholic or rancorous person,therefore, was often considered no more than a 'latecomer, risking beingswept up by his epoch,' a living anachronism who has no chance of surviving if (s)he refuses to be contemporaneous with his/her contemporarieswho focus on the future. 69 From this perspective, historical injustice and itsvictims hardly posed a political problem in the long run. Writing in 1967,Jankelevitch could, for example, still confidently express the idea that:

Sooner or later, the rancorous person will give in to the omnipotenceof time and to the weight of the accumulated years, for time is almostas omnipotent as death, and time is more tenacious than the most tenacious of wills, for it is irresistible! r... ] No resentment, no matter howstubborn it is, can hold fast in the face of this mass of indifference anddisaffection. Everything counsels forgetting! [ ... ] One day or another,in the long run, oceanic forgetting will submerge all rancor underneath

Introduction 13

its leveling grayness, just as the desert sands finish by burying dead cities and defunct civilizations, and just as the accumulation of centuriesand millennia ultimately will envelop inexpiable crimes and undyingglories in the immensity of nothingness.7o

The figure of the living anachronism is still a popular metaphor to describeresentful victims or perpetrators, but the legacy of atrocious pasts hasinternationally become a major political problem. Time and again we areconfronted with narratives of ancient injustices that support claims forreparations or feed contemporary conflict until nobody is still confidentthat the burden of history will just fade away by itself. The relatively recentloss of confidence in time as a force that heals all wounds becomes clearwhen we contrast the foregoing citations of JankeJevitch with a more recentcomment on the subversive nature of atrocious pasts by Michael IgnatieH.71The problem with the past and the reason that it continues to torment,according to Ignatieff, is precisely that it is not past: 'Crimes can never besafely fixed in the historical past: they remain locked in the eternal presentcrying out for vengeance.'72 Ignatieff illustrates his claim by describing howreporters active in the Balkan wars were often confronted with atrocitystories that conflated the contemporary conflict with events dating back asfar as 1941, 1841, or even 1441. He concludes that places like the formerYugoslavia, Rwanda, and South Africa 'are not living in a serial order oftime but in a simultaneous one, in which the past and present are a continuous, agglutinated mass of fantasies, distortions, myths and lies.'73

In the period between the remarks of Jankelevitch and those of IgnatieH, something indeed changed in the regime d'historicite that regulatesmodernity's articulation of past, present, and future. Ignatieff expressesan idea that in a less explicit form has become widespread: that the past inpost-conflict situations somehow gets stuck in the present and refuses to go.Past .and present no longer seem to separate on their own strength. 'Sinceroughly the end of the Cold War,' John Torpey comments, 'the distancethat normally separates us from the past has been strongly challenged infavor of an insistence that the past is constantly, urgently present as partof our everyday experience.'74 The dissemination of an idiom that refersto the ghostly or uncanny nature of the past-talking about the 'hauntingpast,'75 'specters of history,'76 or 'ghosts at the table of democracy,>77 togive just some examples-seems to underscore the widespread feeling of anuncomfortable 'presence.' Advocates of reparation politics, too, often stressthe stubborn persistence of past injustices. The Nigerian Nobel prizewinner Wole Soyinka, for example, substantiates his well-known reparationclaims for the trans-Atlantic slave trade by a reading of the African past asa 'diabolical continuity' in which the ancient slave stockades never seem tovanish.78 Ignatieff thus draws our attention to the fact that the painful pasthaunts us in a manner that influences or even threatens prevalent modernconsciousness of time.


To understand how this change has come about, we can borrow andadapt the notions of the 'irreversible' and the 'irrevocable' by Jankelevitchhimself. Although both the irreversible and the irrevocable are arguablyexperiential categories that are present in all forms of historical consciousness, their changing ratio can help us to distinguish between differingregimes d'historicite. The decline of the idea of progress and the adventof a 'consciousness of man-made catastrophe'79 tend to create a relativelynew historical consciousness. 8o 'Memory of offense,' to borrow a term fromPrimo Levi, has continuously increased since the holocaust and now profoundly challenges modernity's consciousness of time. 81 The growing influence of organized and highly visible victim-groups and 'entrepreneurs ofmemory' has contested the irreversible evaporating past and has given riseto an experience that predominantly accentuates the irrevocable.

Several scholars indeed argue that 'memory' manifests a temporal structure that radically differs from the one of academic historiography. Discussing post-holocaust Jewish memory, Gabrielle Spiegel, for example,claims that this kind of memory tends to conflict with modern historiography because it reincarnates, resurrects, and recycles and refuses to keepthe past in the pastY Similarly, Lawrence Langer asserts that the memoryof atrocity tends to develop a 'durational time' that disrupts chronology.83The opposition in temporal orientation between 'history' and 'memory'has not only been remarked in the context of traumatic memories. One ofthe first to elaborate on this rift was Maurice Halbwachs, who contrastedthe historical enterprise with what he called collective memory.84 YosefHayim Yerushalmi in the early 1980s further elaborated on the differencesbetween historiography and (collective) memory by asserting that memoryin contrast to history seeks not the historicity of the past but its 'eternalcontemporaneity.'85 A similar stance can be found in the work of PierreNora, who claims that memory and history are fundamentally opposed toone another: 'With the appearance of the trace, of mediation, of distance,we are not in the realm of true memory but of history [... ] Memory is aperpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present; history is a representation of the past.'86

What is at stake with the persistence or 'presence without agency'87 ofthe irrevocable past is indeed the clear delineation between past and present that lies at the root of the modern consciousness of time and modernhistoriography, as Reinhart Koselleck and Michel de Certeau have shown. 88

Time in post-conflict contexts often is no longer conceptualized as 'a necessary medium of change'; its passing no longer seems to produce a distancebetween past and present.89 For modernity, which, as Jiirgen Habermasargues, defines itself by its orientation to the new and needs a continuallyrenewed break with the past in order to distinguish itself, as the most recentperiod, from each foregoing epoch, this is quite threatening. 90 As HansBlumenberg stresses, modernity's claim to be able to accomplish this break

lntroauctton 1,)

is far from self-evident because it conflicts with the reality of history whereone can hardly ever start from the ground Up.91

It is exactly in this ambiguous context of a fragile modernity and a shakybelief in the possibility of a strict demarcation of past and present, I argue,that the peculiar turn to history in truth commissions must be situated.The turn to history, I claim, primary has to invoke the notion of irreversibility and restore or enforce the characteristically modernist belief in abreak between past and present that is threatened by a memory that refusesto let the past go. Although truth commissions sincerely reject amnesia,they primarily turn to 'history' in order to pacify the troublesome force of'memory.' History, then, is introduced in the field of transitional justice notdespite an already overabundant memory but because of it. Transitionalpolitics are often interpreted as a search for a proper balance between toomuch memory and too much forgetting,92 but it is my thesis that the currentfield of transitional justice is an arena for two conflicting ways of remembering that are driven by contrary temporal features. 93 I do not interpretthe changing experience of the past as pathology, phantasm, or a distortionof 'real' historical time by 'militant' memory. Instead, I place both memoryand history in the context of a modernist time that is not a natural givenbut a cultural and political artifact; an artifact that, as Jiirgen Habermasremarks, is in constant need of self-reassurance.94

This perspective allows us to grasp a dimension of history that exceedsits traditional functions of representing the past, of searching for the truth,and of generating meaning. In relation to a modernity threatened by theirrevocable, history is useful for a property that, as Mark Phillips points out,is all too often neglected: its regulation of (temporal) 'distance.'95 Our relation to the past is all about producing and manipulating distance, howeverforeshortened or extended. This distance between past and present, Philipsremarks, is not simply given but actively constructed in a broad range of'distance-constructions' that involve ideological and affective implications,cognitive assumptions, and formal traits. This understanding-that the distancing of past and present does not simply result from the passing of timebut is something that must be actively pursued-underpins one of the central propositions of this work. Instead of being a neutral analytical frame,I will argue, history can be performative. By this I mean that historicallanguage is not only used to describe reality (the so-called 'constative' use oflanguage) but that it can also produce substantial socio-political effects andthat, to some extent, it can bring into being the state of affairs it pretendsmerely to describe (the so called 'performative' use of language).96

In order to understand why this performative 'distancing' is importantfor countries going through transition, one has to take a look at the closerelationship between the politics of time and the project of nation building. Benedict Anderson argues that the 'obscure genesis' of modern nationscannot be understood without taking fully into account the development


of a specific concept of 'simultaneity.' This 'cross-time simultaneity,' whichis measured by clock and calendar, has been a long time in the makingand, according to Anderson, is in marked contrast to the medieval Christian conception of 'simultaneity-along-time', in which past and future werefused into an instantaneous present by divine prefiguring and fulfillment. 97

The idea of the modern nation as a solid community moving through history is a precise analogue of the idea of a 'sociological organism movingcalendrically through homogeneous, empty time.' As Anderson puts it:

An American will never meet, or even know the names of more than ahandful of his 240,OOO-odd [sic] fellow Americans. He has no idea ofwhat they are up to at anyone time. But he has complete confidence intheir steady, anonymous, simultaneous activity.98

Nation building could then be interpreted as based on the complex creation of an idea of temporal simultaneity. It is, however, exactly this projectof simultaneity that is threatened by the abundant memories of atrociouspasts. From this perspective, the major threat posed by these memories isnot that they evoke a divisive past but rather, as we have seen, that they tendto experience this divisive past as irrevocable and refuse to let it go. Societies dealing with a divisive irrevocable past and trying to create a nationalsimultaneity, then, primarily turn to a historical discourse in order to produce a sense of irreversibility and to reestablish or impose the modernistdisjuncture between past and present. Although the remembrance of a divisive past will never be conducive to the creation of a nation-wide experienceof simultaneity, it helps if that past is collectively remembered as remainingat a 'distance' from, or separate from, the present.

However, history's contribution to the project of simultaneity has sideeffects: Often the construction of national simultaneity comes at the cost ofthe exclusion of people who cannot or do not want to leave the past 'behind.'Borrowing a term from the anthropologist Johannes Fabian, I will therefore argue that the discourse on the irreversible time of history sometimestends to become an 'allochronistic' practice: a practice that (symbolically)allocates into another time or treats as non-simultaneous all those whorefuse to participate in the process of nation building or reconciliation.99

OUTLINE OF THE BOOK

This book consists of two parts, each in its turn subdivided into differentchapters. In the first part, I set myself a double goal. First I try to demonstrate that the notion of irrevocability can be related relevantly to widespread popular experiences of historicity, and that this notion has greatethical relevance. Second I elaborate on my claims about the ethical implications of discourses on history and irreversible historical time (which I

1 rttfUUULLtUTL .L I

formulated in more abstract terms above) by analyzing their performativity. Although this performativity can be benign and often is experienced asa necessity, it is never ethically neutral.

In order to make both points, each of the three following chapters discusses the introduction and contestation of historical discourse in truthcommissions and the broader context of transitional justice. First I focuson the transitional justice situation in Argentina; second I analyze the caseof South Africa; and third I discuss the case of Sierra Leone, where a truthcommission and a war tribunal were combined. From a geopolitical perspective, Argentina, South Africa, and Sierra Leone could be called peripheral or (in the case of the first two) at best semi-peripheral, and the threecountries have the sad honor that their best known export products arenewly coined terms and concepts that originated in their horrific historiesof conflict: from 'desaparecido' and 'dirty war,' over 'Apartheid' and 'necklacing,' to 'blood diamonds' and 'juju warriors.' However, when lookedon from the perspective of legal philosophy or international law, the threecountries have been at the core of recent evolutions in transitional justice,and most importantly they each represent a landmark in the evolution ofthe formula of the truth commission. A focus on the cases of Argentina,South Africa, and Sierra Leone offers a privileged overview of the broadertruth commission phenomenon because the commissions established inthese three countries together span a period of three decades and alsobecause they influenced one another and were crucial in the constructionof a common canon.

Because the truth commission in Argentina was held behind closeddoors and because it was primarily meant as an inquiry that eventually hadto assist and facilitate the much more ambitious trial of the junta leaders, Iwill mainly elaborate on the protest it provoked and will try to analyze therelation between historical discourse and the public protest of the 'Madresde Plaza de Mayo.' The next two chapters, in contrast, primarily focuson the workings of the truth commissions themselves. However, in thesechapters, too, I try to highlight the resistance against the truth commissionsand their use of a historical discourse. Using NGO reports and materialfrom their well-documented website, I will discuss the position of the SouthAfrican 'Khulumani Victim Support Group.' Relying on anthropologicalliterature, I will discuss the popular resistance against the work of the truthcommission in Sierra Leone.

The focus on transitional justice yields interesting insights because, asone commentator puts it, 'seldom does history seem so urgently relevantor important as in moments of sudden political transition from one stateform to another.'lOo Focusing on relatively exceptional but nonethelesswidespread situations of transition, we can learn a lot about historiansand historical discourse in more 'normal' settings. This is so because thepolitical reality of truth commissions and transitional justice confronts uswith a context that strongly differs from the historical context in which the


academic discipline of history has mostly developed. Instead of the overwhelming socio-cultural experience of constant change or mutability and aseemingly unstoppable progress that has long urged historians to primarilyconceive of their discipline as a great conservational operation that neededto save a past that was threatened with permanent loss, the field of transitional justice confronts us, as I have argued above, with a situation in whichnot the flight of the past but its refusal to go constitutes the main problem.The problematic persistence of a traumatic and often highly divisive pastin countries trying to transition and recover from violent conflict, indeed,implicitly questions the apparent self-evidence of irreversible historical timeand proves the relevance of the concept of the irrevocable.

After this fairly concrete analysis of the three case studies, I take thediscussion to a more abstract philosophical level in the second part of thisbook. Once more the goal is two-fold. In the first chapter of this secondpart (Chapter 5 of the book), I try to answer the question of why it is sohard for modern Western thinkers to take seriously the common claims byvictims and survivors that the past persists and haunts the present. Certainconceptualizations of time and historicity that are widespread in academichistoriography and in current historical thinking in the West, I argue, impelthe latter to conceive the past as irreversible and restrain them in fullyunderstanding, recognizing, or even imagining the irrevocable. Referringto insights of thinkers as diverse as Reinhart Koselleck, Frank Ankersmit,Karl Mannheim, Fran~ois Hartog, Paul de Man, ]iirgen Habermas, andCharles Taylor, I relate the denial of the irrevocable and the promotion ofthe irreversible to a set of 'chronosophical' elements such as the use of anabsolute, empty, and homogenous time; the historicist account of historical change; the modernist stress on historical novelty and the disjunctureamong past, present, and future; and the treatment of history as an entirelysecular realm.

Far from being universal or 'of all ages,' these chronosophical elementsand the irreversible time of history they bolster are historical constructions that are closely related to the disenchanted worldview that slowly andirregularly has developed in the West. That irreversible historical time isnot universally accepted is exemplified by the resistance against its dissemination in the context of transitional justice. This resistance should makeus ponder whether the international dissemination of the irreversible timeof history could not in certain cases amount to a specific variation on theimposition of a Western 'temporal architecture' as it has taken place, forexample, in the fields of political and economical organization.1Dl However,let me make it clear that I do not think that the conflict between differingchronosophies follows a clear divide between the West and the non-West.Although it is widespread and influential, I do not take the irreversibletime of history to be the one and only form of historical consciousness thatrules unchallenged over the world or even over the 'Western' part of theworld. Reality is far more complex, with conflicts about time and regimes

Introduction 19

d'historicite existing on several levels, both between cultures and withincultures or subcultures, etc.101

The second chapter of the second part of the book (Chapter 6) is dedicated to the search for an alternative chronosophy that enables us to thinkthrough and explain (or at least offers us a good starting point to do so)the irrevocable. Several thinkers have developed views on time that significantly differ from the irreversible time of history with its stress on theabsent or distant past. In order for an alternative chronosophy to providethe intellectual space necessary to recognize the irrevocable, it will haveto break with the idea of the absent or distant past and be able to includeinto its perspective a notion of 'non-synchronicity' or even 'anachronicity.'The work of thinkers such as Fernand Braudel, R. G. Collingwood, ErnstBloch, and Louis Althusser partially and in varying degrees provides suchperspectives. In a much more radical way, such a perspective is provided by]acques Derrida. During the last years of his life, Derrida dedicated a lotof his attention to the haunting past and the ambiguous position of debtof the living generations in relation to this past. Discussing the enigmaticsurvival of the past, Derrida tellingly spoke about his perspective as revolving around a 'spectral' concept of time. It has hardly been noticed by anyhistorian or philosopher of history at all, but this concept of a spectral timeprofoundly challenges irreversible historical time, and therefore I considered it appropriate to dedicate a separate chapter (the third chapter of thesecond part, Chapter 7) to Derrida and his chronosophy.

In the fourth and final chapter of this book, I will return to a somewhatmore concrete level by moving the discussion away from a strict focuson time to a discussion of the relation between history and mourning.Here I will argue that one can learn a lot by approaching history as apractice of mourning, but that the conclusions that one draws from thisintellectual exercise strongly depend on the specific concept of mourningthat one takes as a point of departure. Many of the 'ontological commitments' underlying mainstream modern historical thinking can also befound in the dominant modern account of mourning, which in many waysopposes the older and more widespread non-mode~nnotions of mourning.Modern mourning theory obscures the phenomenon of the irrevocable,and consequently it also denies most dimensions of its own performativity. Because non-modern mourning, while offering a better starting pointto think about the irrevocable and while recognizing a much more substantial notion of performativity, often is based on an all-too-enchantedworldview, I will once more turn to the work of ]acques Derrida in orderto provide an alternative position.

Part I

2 'La Muerte No Existe'The Madres de Plaza de Mayoand the Resistance against theIrreversible Time of History

This war, like all wars, leaves some aftereffects, great wounds thattime, and only time, can heal. They are caused by the losses; the dead,the wounded, the detained, the ones 'forever absent.'

General R.E. Viola 1

'[Why do] they like the dead? Because death is final.'

Hebe de Bonafini2

INTRODUCTION

In the preface to a book published on the occasion of the 30th birthday of thelast military coup in Argentina, Hebe de Bonafini, the president of the Madresde Plaza de Mayo, quotes some provocative words of the writer Galeano: lamuerte no existe-'death does not exist.'3 Radical as it may be, this expressionis in line with an intriguing slogan that has characterized the Madres' strugglefor almost three decades: aparicion con vida-'living appearance.' Ever sincethe disappearance of their sons and daughters in the late 1970s, the group ofmothers around Hebe de Bonafini has claimed that disappearance is a 'stateof being,' more than merely signifying death or the absolute lack of knowledge about someone's fate. 4 Even after several bodies washed ashore on thecoasts of the Atlantic and after secret mass burials were discovered all overthe country, the Madres de Plaza de Mayo continued to insist that the desaparecidos-the Spanish name for the victims of the military who vanishedwithout a trace-are not like 'ordinary' dead but are, instead, in between lifeand death. As Hebe de Bonafini once famously declared, 'the mothers of thedisappeared will not be converted into the mothers of the dead.'5 The Madresconsistently speak about their disappeared children in the present tense andcount their birthdays as if they were still aging each year.

This idea of immortality might seem strange for a movement that grewout of a group of grieving women who initially met one another in what one


commentator referred to as 'public institutions of death': hospitals, policestations, army garrisons, morgues, and cemeteries. 6 This was especially thecase in a society where women were traditionally expected to perform therole of 'reproducers of life and guardians of death.'7 The Madres' ceaseless(and soon internationally reputed) protest marches on the main square inBuenos Aires and their incredible strength born out of despair perplexedthe military, which initially did not understand the full extent of the challenge and laconically ridiculed the women by calling them las locas dePlaza de Mayo-'the mad women of the square.'

Once the military dictatorship was over, the persistent refusal to mourn(although of course not a refusal to grieveH

) and to recognize the deathof the desaparecidos did not make the Madres very popular in the widerArgentine society. Their stance met with sympathetic incomprehension atbest or, worse, was renounced by a majority who wanted to move on andthought that mothers should mourn privately and keep silent.9 As one member of the Madres commented at the end of the 1980s, 'Aparici6n con vidais the most controversial of our slogans because a lot of people support us,but say aparici6n con vida no. You're mad.... '10

Scholars have indeed tried to grasp the Madres' denial of death interms of psychopathology related to the problematic of mourning without a body.ll The relatives' endless waiting for the desaparecidos to comehome is sometimes described in psychological terms as 'mummification.'12The demand for aparici6n con vida, similarly, has been analyzed as hopeagainst hope or, worse, as pre-rational or even magical thinking.13

Although a psycho-social analysis can be helpful to understand the particular problems with which the relatives of the disappeared are coping,and although an aspect of magical language can hardly be denied in theMadres' ghostlike representation of the desaparecidos, these perspectivesare insufficient to understand the entire political and ethical extent of thedemand for 'living appearance' and the refusal to perform the work ofmourning demanded by society.14 In this chapter I will read the Madres'discourse as a radical resistance to the irreversible time of history. TheMadres' staging of the spectral figure of the desaparecidu, I argue, has tobe placed within a context of a sophisticated politics of time.

TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE IN ARGENTINA:A LONG AND WINDING ROAD

When the free elections of 1983 formally put an end to seven years of military dictatorship, the reemerging Argentine democracy inherited a heavily burdened legacy that would be troublesome for more than a quarterof a century to come. Since the reestablishment of democracy, every successive government has been confronted with both a continuous demandfor justice by the victims of state terrorism and a pressure for amnesty by

'La Muerte No Jc,Xlste' 1.)

the military. Although the violent years between 1976 and 1983 are stillsubject to strongly antagonistic interpretations by diverse societal groups,nobody can deny that the desaparecidos-as a 'population of ghosts'have become an integral part of Argentine politics and society,15

The coup of 1976 was no unique event in Argentine history; in fact it wasonly the last one in a long 'national tradition' of military takeovers. Neitherdid political violence and state terrorism start on the night of 23 March1976, when the military junta led by General Jorge Rafael Videla overthrew the elected government. However, none of the preceding coups andno previous political violence approached the extent of violence that wasto follow. 16 Under the veil of national security, thousands of people wereabducted in a secret but well-planned campaign that was mastermindedby the military high command. People disappeared from their bedrooms atnight, were abducted from their workplace, or were taken from the streetin broad daylight.17 Once 'disappeared,' typically nothing was ever heardfrom them, nor were bodies returned. The victims simply stopped havingany civil existence and entered the lugubrious and ghostly category of thedesaparecidus. 18

The victims were generally not officially arrested and put into prison butwere held in secret detention centers (Centros Clandestinos de Detenci6n).Approximately 600 of these centers are estimated to have existed.19 Theywere true sites of horror. Torture was applied without exception, and thecalvary of the victims most often ended in a journey that led to mass burials and anonymous graves or even to the Argentine rivers and the sea. Thenumber of desaparecidos is still disputed-about 9,000 cases have beenidentified, some speak about a number up to 30,000-but contrary to themilitary rhetoric, there is relative consensus that most of them were neverinvolved in armed struggle or even in any political activity.20

For quite a while, the tactic of making people disappear proved to beeffective in avoiding the creation of martyrs around whose names and bodies public protest could be organized. In the first year of the coup, no oneprotested abroad, as big crowds had done throughout the world four yearsearlier, when Pinochet started torturing and killing his political opponentsin Chile. Furthermore, no country broke off its diplomatic relations withArgentina, as many had done with Chile. 21

Once it was confronted with public protest, the military declared thatit dealt with an enemy that used guerilla techniques and that this guerrasucia ['dirty war'] demanded an adapted counterstrategy that could not berestricted to the rule of law. In fact, the military was proud of what it calledits 'war against subversion,' and despite the courage and perseverance ofthe Madres de Plaza de Mayo and others, the eventual demise of the juntaswas provoked not by the protests against their violations of human rightsbut by internal divisions and some external events. Ultimately, it was acombination of economic crisis and a humiliating defeat in the war overthe Islas Malvinas (Falkland Islands) that forced the military to organize


a return to civilian rule and to negotiate with the democratic political parties that took advantage of the power vacuum to organize and unite into aMultipartidaria ('Multiparty').22

Before handing over political power, however, the military tried to makesure it would not be prosecuted for its human rights violations. In order tosafeguard itself, it took three precautions. 23 First, in April 1983, the juntapublished the 'Final Document on the War Against Subversion and Terrorism' (this document will be discussed in more detail later). This document claimed that the junta had fulfilled its duty in service of the nationand stated that the desaparecidos, if they were not in exile or in hiding,perished in open confrontation and thus had to be considered dead. Second, the junta issued the 'Law of National Pacification,' a blanket amnestythat granted immunity to some suspected terrorists and all members of themilitary for crimes committed between 1973 and June 1982. Third, themilitary ordered the destruction of all documents and archives that couldincriminate it.

At this point in Argentine history, it was not unthinkable (to make anunderstatement) that the military, in spite of the lobbying of human rightsorganizations, would succeed in covering up what it had done and in escaping accountability. Although human rights organizations had great moralauthority in the years immediately following the transition, their directpolitical influence was small. In contrast, the military's grievances werehard to ignore because of the simple fact that it had easy access to arms. Ifthe cry for justice of the victims and their relatives, then, got any responseon the political level, it was because, in a total surprise, the first presidentialelections were won by a candidate of the 'Radical Party' with a campaignthat placed human rights on the agenda. 24

One of the first decisions that Raul Alfonsfn made when he entered Officein December 1983 was to establish a commission of inquiry. Shortly thereafter he found the political support to nullify the military's self-amnesty.Nevertheless, the human rights policy that Alfonsfn designed together withhis legal advisers Jaime Malamud-Goti and CarIos Santiago Nino wasprimarily oriented to the future. The backward gaze of retributive justiceconcerned with redressing human rights abuses of the past had to be subordinated to a strategy that prevented their reappearance in the future, consolidated the stability of democratic rule, and did not agitate the militarytoo much. 25 To that end, Alfonsfn opted for a truth commission that workedbehind closed doors, had a limited legal mandate, and was directly responsive to him in contrast to the desire of the human rights movement, whichfavored a stronger commission that would be able to compel testimonyfrom perpetrators and would be responsive to the Chambers of Congress. 26

Furthermore, Alfonsfn decided that all prosecutions-both those undertaken by private parties as well as those of the government-would first besent to a military court instead of a civilian one so that the military would

'La Muerte No Existe' 27

be granted the opportunity to purge and exonerate its own institution. Inaddition to that, Alfonsfn made it clear that he wanted only a small part ofthe military personnel to be prosecuted. 27 In order to uphold a semblanceof moral evenhandedness, he also issued a document that stated that theterrorism of the military had been provoked by the left-wing terrorism thatpreceded it-an attempt at official historiography that became infamous asthe 'two demons' theory (dos demonios). Accordingly he announced thathe would also prosecute some of the former guerilla leaders who had justreturned from exile. 28

The Comisi6n Nacional sobre la Desaparici6n de Personas ('NationalCommission on the Disappearance of Persons' [CONADEP]), establishedby decree in December 1983, was made up of ten prominent members ofArgentine society who enjoyed national and international prestige for theirdevotion to human rights, with the renowned novelist Ernesto Sabato presiding. 29 Within the term of nine months that it was given to scrutinize thecrimes of the juntas committed between 1976 and 1983, the commissiontook about 7,000 testimonies in which it documented the cases of 8,961persons who disappeared.

Besides taking statements, the commission also identified and visited alarge number of secret detention centers and organized some exhumationsof mass burials and anonymous graves. Responding to the request of relatives who believed that some desaparecidos were still alive, the CONADEPwent searching for unidentified persons in prisons and psychiatric institutions. Athough its efforts to locate living desaparecidos proved fruitless, thecommission gathered a huge amount of information, and its overall resultswere considered successful by the president and his advisers. 3o On 20 September 1984, the commission handed over 50,000 pages of documentationto President Alfonsfn, and a book-length version of the report, omittingthe names of perpetrators, was published. 31 Despite their initial resistance,most human rights organizations in time came to cooperate with the CONADEP. One important exception has been the Madres de Plaza de Mayo,who continued to criticize the commission (more on that later).

Alfonsfn's attempt to let the military purge itself proved far less successful than his truth commission initiative. His human rights policy suffereda serious setback when the Supreme Council-the highest military courtstated its inability and lack of will to prosecute the junta leaders, makingit necessary to transfer the prosecutions to the (civil) Federal Court. 32 Thiseventually led to a relatively unique event in Latin American history: thehighly publicized trial of the nine military commanders of the three successive juntas. In March 1985, Public Prosecutor Julio Strassera formulated711 charges, including murder, illegal detention, torture, rape, and robbery, and demanded appropriate sentences. 33 The final verdict of the courtpronounced life imprisonment for Videla and Massera. Agosti, Viola, andLambruschini were, respectively, sentenced to four years and six months,seventeen years, and eight years of imprisonment. All were disqualified in


perpetuity from holding public office and were stripped of their militaryrank. The others-Graffigna, Galtieri, Anaya, and Lami Dozo-wereacquitted on the grounds that the bulk of the 'dirty war' crimes had ceasedduring their reign. 34

In the wake of the trial of the junta leaders, an increasing number ofprosecutions, filed by relatives of persons who disappeared, slowly started.However, once well on their way, the prosecutions were halted by twointerventions by Alfonsfn's government. Worried by the strong reactions ofthe military and challenged by a series of bombings by ultra-right groups,Alfonsin asked his advisers to draft a legal strategy that would limit thepunitive process. 35 In the beginning of December 1986, this resulted in thepunto final ('full-stop') law, which prescribed that further legal proceedingshad to be initiated within a deadline of sixty days from its declaration. Themeasure proved counterproductive, however, and triggered an avalanche ofnew prosecutions.J6 Neither did it appease the military.

In April 1987, an attempt to arrest an officer who refused to show up incourt resulted in a military revolt. 37 Through a dramatic personal intervention, Alfonsfn was able to end the revolt, but he could do so only by secretlymaking concessions to the military. Less than a month later, Alfonsfn proposed the infamous obediencia debida law ('law of due obedience') thatexcluded from prosecution all members of the military and the securityforces who had acted under orders. Its practical effect was to grant amnestyto approximately 300 of the 500 accused military officers. The law waswidely seen as a sell-out, and it provoked strong reactions from the humanrights organizations. 1K It did not satisfy the military either, and the timeof rebellion was not over. Between 1988 and 1990 four military mutiniesand one left-wing siege of a military garrison took place. 39 Meanwhile thegovernment had to cope with economic problems, and during a period ofhyperinflation, Alfonsfn ended up handing over his presidential power sixmonths early to Carlos Menem, the Peronist candidate who won the elections of May 1989.

With the victory of Menem, a tragic period started for all who cared forhuman rights and justice in Argentina. Menem's policy was led by pragmatic considerations in which matters of political stability prevailed overnormative principles. In relation to the legacy of the human rights violations, Menem's answer was 'national reconciliation.' By this he basicallymeant that the issue had to be left behind. 'The past has nothing more toteach us,' Menem assured. 'We must look ahead, with our eyes fixed onthe future. Unless we learn to forget,' he warned, 'we will be turned intoa pillar of salt.'40 In October 1989, Menem issued a series of decrees thatpardoned more than 300 persons who were being prosecuted. The pardonsmainly applied to military men accused of crimes committed during the'dirty war,' but they also applied to some leftist 'subversives' accused ofcrimes in the 1970s and even to the officers who rebelled against the government in the late 1980s. A year later a second series of pardons followed,

now even covering those who were already convicted, including the juntaleaders Videla, Massera, and Viola and the guerilla leader Mario EduardoFirmenich.41 It hardly needs to be mentioned that the pardons embitteredthe victims and their relatives, but also a total of 70 percent of the generalpopulation opposed them. 42

The unique realizations in the quest for justice by the CONADEP andthe Junta Trial that were already tempered by the punto final and the obediencia debida laws were now completely annulled. During the early 1990s,the human rights organizations carried on their quest for justice by takingit overseas. Court proceedings were started in Spain, Italy, Sweden, France,Germany, and Mexico, but extradition requests were systematically refusedfrom the Argentine side.43 In 1995 the burdened past returned to Argentinawith full force when some military men, immune from prosecution, madea series of horrible confessions about their activities during the 'dirty war.'The most notorious of these confessions came from retired navy captainAdolfo Scilingo, who admitted to his participation in two 'death flights,'during which he threw thirty drugged victims from an aircraft into thesea.44 In a few weeks time, one confession followed the other in the media,and the 'confessional tide' came to a climax when army chief of staff General Martin Balza appeared on television to officially acknowledge that thearmy had used illegitimate methods during the 'dirty war.'45

Profiting from the renewed public attention, the Centro de EstudiosLegales Y Sociales (CELS), one of the most important Argentine humanrights organizations, rallied for what it called juicios por la verdad ('truthtrials'). Lacking any possibility of prosecution or punishment, these trials were a form of judicial action that limited itself to investigation anddocumentation. Human Rights Watch calls the truth trials a fundamentallegal innovation, and their principle has been approved of by the InterAmerican Commission on Human Rights, but the Madres de Plaza deMayo have strongly criticized them as powerless and deeply cynical (moreabout that later).46

More recently, better news on the impunity issue is coming from Argentina. In March 2001, Gabriel Cavallo, a federal judge, declared that theamnesty laws in Argentina were unconstitutional and void, thereby reopening the possibility of prosecution. In October 2001, another federal judgeClaudio Bonadfo-likewise ruled that the punto final and the obedienciadebida laws were unconstitutional and null, but the issue was delayedwhen later that year Argentina suffered a major economic crisis and wentthrough four presidents in a few weeks.47 Two years later, in 2003, thingsstarted moving again when Nestor Kirchner was elected president with acampaign that stressed human rights. In August that year, Kirchner gathered the congressional support necessary to annul the two amnesty lawsand reopen a few major cases that had been shelved for more than a decade.The unconstitutionality of the punto final law and the obediencia debidalaw finally was confirmed by the Supreme Court in June 2005. Although


the presidential pardons granted by Menem to more than 400 officersstill stand, the overturning of the punto final and obediencia debida lawsopened a lot of new opportunities.48

In 2004, Kirchner announced that the Escuela Superior de Mecanica dela Armada, a notorious clandestine detention and torture center in BuenosAires widely known as the ESMA, would become the location for a memorial dedicated to the victims of the state terror.49 With this developmentand that of the creation of a Park of Memory, Argentina finally seemed toacknowledge its dark legacy.50

THE MADRES IN TIMES OF DICTATORSHIP

The Madres de Plaza de Mayo came into existence in 1977 when, shortlyafter the military coup and the start of the first wave of disappearances, agroup of mothers convened in order to organize the search for their sons anddaughters and give voice to their protest. The Madres first gathered secretlybut soon decided to go public with their protest to the square in front ofthe presidential palace.51 On 30 April 1977, fourteen mothers assembledin the Plaza de Mayo.52 Soon the number of mothers coming to the squareincreased: Shortly after their first meeting they counted 60 or 70, and a bitlater there were about 300 of them. Meanwhile the Madres also assuredtheir presence in other marches and public happenings, where they tried todraw attention by wearing their children's diapers as headscarves. 53

Because the national press remained almost completely silent about theirprotest, the Madres decided to place a paid advertisement in a paper. 54 InOctober 1977, the ad appeared in La Prensa. The headline read, 'We donot ask for anything more than truth; and the ad listed the cases of 237disappeared people who the Madres had been able to trace.5S

Until this moment, the Madres suffered some maltreatment, but theirsocial status as mothers and older women had protected them from the farmore brutal violence that their sons and daughters had suffered. This wasabout to change. Their public protest and the signed ad in the paper madethe Madres extremely vulnerable. A month after the placement of the ad,the movement was infiltrated, and subsequently three of the founding members of the Madres were abducted together with a sympathizing artist andtwo French nuns. 56 The losses came as a terrible blow to the movement.

In 1978, Argentina hosted the World Cup of soccer. Streams of touristsand the extensive international attention meant great possibilities for theMadres. 57 But the preparations of the World Cup also provoked increasedpolitical repression. Moreover, the upsurge in patriotism that accompaniedthe sports games made it very hard for the Madres to disseminate their message of protest through the Argentine public. The Madres were accused oforganizing an anti-Argentina campaign, and they lost the little popular support they had. 58 In this context of widespread indifference, the authorities

'La Muerte No Existe' 31

had free reign in their repression. Toward the end of 1978 and the start of1979, the Madres suffered their most severe persecution.59 Mothers werearrested and humiliated repeatedly. The increased police brutality made itvery hard for the mothers to keep up their weekly presence on the Plazade Mayo, and eventually they temporarily had to return to the clandestineexistence of their first days.60

If the Madres survived this period of increased repression and isolation, it was due to a solidarity campaign and diplomatic pressure that camefrom abroad. 61 The military regime killed and abducted a large number offoreign citizens and citizens with dual nationality. This provoked increaseddiplomatic activity in several of the embassies in Buenos Aires. The militarystarted to feel pressure from several countries, including Sweden, Germany,France, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United States. In September 1979,the Human Rights Commission of the Organization of American Statescame to inspect the suspected violations. 62 The Madres had been rallyingfor its coming ever since they began their struggle, but they would be leftvery disappointed. 63 While the commission issued a 374-page documentthat strongly criticized the military regime, the junta refused to release thereport, and it seemed to have no further consequences. Moreover, the mothers came to deeply regret their testimony before the commission becausemany of the names and data found their way to the military regime. 64

However, the combination of growing international attention and theefforts of communities of political exiles scattered around the world enabledthe Madres to establish an extensive international solidarity network. Byspring 1979, the Madres, backed by the international support, were againready to make a move on the domestic front. In an act of open rebellion,they set up a legally registered association.6' With the financial support ofinternational solidarity organizations, they could even afford an office oftheir own in early 1980.66 From this office they would soon start to writeand publish numerous pamphlets, booklets, and even a paper. Around thesame time, the Madres decided to go back to the Plaza de Mayo no matterhow fierce the repression. From this moment on, they would not stop goingto the Plaza until their 15,000th and last march almost three decades laterin 2006.67

1981 was an important year for the Madres. The domestic popular support for their struggle finally increased, while the junta began facing cleavages in its ranks and proved incapable of containing the economic crisis.Toward the end of the dictatorship, the protests of the Madres attractedmore and more people until they became huge public manifestations. Thetone of the Madres steadily changed, and instead of humbly asking forcompassion they now started to demand. When the military attempted torepeat its World Cup trick, trying to create popular consent and patriotismby invading the MalvinaslFalkland isles in 1982, the Madres replied withan adapted campaign: 'Las Malvinas son Argentinas, los desaparecidostambien' {'the Falklands are Argentinean, the desaparecidos toO').68


After the humiliating defeat by the British, the end of the military dictatorship was in sight. Soon a transitional government started to preparefor democracy, and on 10 December 1983, Alfonsfn was inaugurated aspresident. For days Argentina became the scene of excited celebrations inhonor of democracy. However, for the Madres, intense joy was mixed withan even more intense sadness. The transition to democracy was a momentof hope, but it also presented a new challenge in the quest for justice andmemory. Already during the dictatorship, frictions had arisen between different human rights movements that were active in Argentina. Differencesin political style and strategy created tensions between the so-called afectados-human rights groups made up of victims or relatives-and the non-affected-organizations staffed mainly by professionals. 69 After the transitionto democracy, discussions on political positions and alliances also had aneffect on the group of the afectados itself. One of the major controversiesrevolved around the question of what stances to take on the Alfonsfn administration/o Another heated discussion arose on the proper strategy to securethe remembrance of the desaparecidos. 71 These issues eventually led to theSpllttJlllg of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo in 1986.72 Agitated by the leadership style of Madres President Hebe de Bonafini and her inflexible attitude toward the democratic government, a group left the organization andstarted a new one that they named the 'Madres de Plaza de Mayo-LineaFundadora.'?3 Both groups-the one led by Ilebe de Bonafini and the newone led by Marfa Adela Antokoletz-kept meeting weekly in the Plaza deMayo, but Hebe's fraction accused the dissidents of being 'alfonsinistas.'?4In what follows I will focus on the group organized around de Bonafini.?5

CALLING UP GHOSTS. THE MADRES'RESISTANCE IN TIMES OF DEMOCRACY

The night before Alfonsfn's inauguration, hundreds of posters appeared inthe streets of Buenos Aires. They were hand-drawn outlines of life-sizedhuman figures who had no individual features and-with the exception ofsome, where friends and family had not been able to resist the urge-boreno name or age/6 Their ghostlike presence had to represent the desaparecidos in the new period of democracy. The event is a perfect example ofthe peculiar strategy that the Madres de Plaza de Mayo were to develop inthe coming decades. In order to get a first insight into this strategy, it suffices to cast a glance on a manifest that lists their stances.?? The documentbears no date but is clearly a later one: The Madres have developed anoutright revolutionary discourse that is no longer restricted to the protection of basic human rights but also includes an ambitious project of socioeconomic reforms. However, what concerns us here is another aspect of theradical and highly consistent discourse of the Madres: their attribution ofan almost spectral status to the desaparecidos.

La lVluene l'lU LA-'''''' JJ

One of the first points in the document states that the desaparecidos arealive; the reasoning is the following:

We the Madres de Plaza de Mayo know that our children are not dead;they live in the struggle, the dreams and the revolutionary promiseof other youngsters. We the Madres de Plaza de Mayo encounter ourchildren in every man or woman who rises to liberate his or her people.The 30.000 desaparecidos live in everyone who dedicates his/her lifeso that others could live.?8

The next point, 'Carcel a los genocidas; demands punishment for the perpetrators of the 'genocide' and is an outcry against impunity. Following thispoint is a far more peculiar one in which exhumations are rejected:

The Madres de Plaza de Mayo reject exhumations because our childrenare no corpses. Our children have physically disappeared but live inthe struggle, the ideals and the commitment of all those who strugglefor justice and the freedom of their people. The remains of our children have to stay where they fell. There are no tombs to bury a revolutionary. A handful of bones does not identify them because they aredreams, hope and an example for the generations to come. 79

Next, the Madres state that they reject economic reparations: 'What hasto be repaired with justice, one cannot repair with money.'80 The followingpoint is, at first sight, odd for a movement that struggles against forgetting,but it is consistent with the idea that the desaparecidos are not dead. TheMadres reject post-humous honoring:

We reject nameplates and monuments because they signify the burying of the dead. [... ] Posthumous honoring only serves those who areresponsible for the impunity and want to wash away their guilt. Theonly monument that we can erect is an uncompromising commitmenttoward their ideals. 81

When asked where their radical stance on memory and justice comes from,the Madres refer to the case of transitional justice in Bolivia that warnedthem and served as a negative example. They claim that they started rejecting economic reparations, exhumations, and monuments after they visitedBolivia, where they saw how victims were taken in by the human rights commission, which gave them some monuments and a little money but which,according to them, meanwhile handed the victims over to military men andpoliticians who investigated nothing and left everything as it was. 82

The negative experiences with the Bolivian case probably influencedthe Madres' hostile position toward the CONADEP. Other human rightsorganizations too initially reacted negatively to Alfonsfn's design of the


commission. Just like the Madres, many human rights organizations initially feared that the establishment of a truth commission was only a strategy to gain time and let things cool down. Just like the Madres, moreover,most other members of the human rights community criticized the controversial prologue of the Nunca Mas report, which implicitly equaled thestate terror with the violence of the left-wing guerilla. 83 The disappointmentabout the fact that the report failed to name the perpetrators was anotheremotion that was widely shared among human rights activists. However,although most human rights organizations eventually came to endorse thecommission and collaborated with it, the Madres never changed their position and later on became even more hostile toward Sabato's work.

The reason for this continued resistance was in the last instance based ona critique of another nature than the ones jw:;t summed up-one that wasunique for the Madres. The Madres were concerned that the commission,with its narrative of mass extermination and secret graves, would facilitatethe symbolical burial of the desaparecidos. 84 The truth produced by theCONADEP, the Madres claimed, was a 'truth of the graveyards' (verdad delos cementerios), and the resulting remembrance was a 'memory of death'(memoria de la muerte) instead of the 'fertile memory' (memoria (htil)that they advocated. 85

This suspicion only increased when the CONADEP ordered the excavationof a series of graves. The Madres were convinced that these exhumationswere part of a government strategy to transform the desaparecidos into'ordinary' dead in order to demobilize the grieving mothers and to close theentire chapter. In retrospect, they speak about the exhumations as the firstphase of Alfonsin's Punto Final: 'the "full stop" did not start with the "fullstop"-Iaw; it started when Alfonsin during his first months of governmentstarted to send us telegrams telling that our children were dead in this orthat cemetery [ ... ] The "full stop" was a little plate in every place saying"here studied," "here worked." '86

The Madres criticized the sensationalist media that turned the issue intoa 'horror show,' which according to them would help Alfonsin to realizea kind of closure by overkill: 'People were saturated with horror and theydidn't want to know any more about it, because horror has its limits. Thatwas the intention.'87 Moreover, they claimed that the exhumations onlyconfirmed what was already known. They were not interested in morbiddetails and feared that accepting the death of the desaparecidos wouldweaken their strategic position in the quest for justice. Resisting the urge tohave the remains of their child returned to them must have been extremelyhard for most mothers. Hebe de Bonafini recalls how difficult it was to takethe radical stance on exhumations: 'It cost us weeks and weeks of meetingsat which there were many tears and much despair, because the profoundCatholic formation of our people creates almost a need to have a deadbody, a burial, and a Mass.'88

The Madres not only symbolically opposed exhumation, they also physically attempted to stop forensic archeologists from digging up bodies. Aftera few unprofessional exhumations where bulldozers and unskilled gravediggers ruined crucial forensic evidence, human rights groups urged theCONADEP to seek the help of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.89 By request of the CONADEP, the famous Americanforensic archeologist Clyde Snow came to Argentina in order to train localarcheologists to become forensic specialists. After Snow trained a teamthat would later form the basis of the internationally renowned EquipoArgentino de Antropologfa Forense (EAAF), one of his most importantassignments was the exhumation of Liliana Pereyra on a cemetery in Mardel Plata. Liliana's mother had asked for the exhumation, but two otherbodies were expected to lie in the grave, and one of these bodies was presumed to belong to Ana Maria Torti, whose mother was a member of theMadres and refused to give permission for the grave to be opened. The firstday of the exhumation, the archeologists were able to work without greatdisturbances. However, when the archeologists entered the graveyard thefollowing day, they encountered a large group of activists standing aroundthe half-open graves. The Madres had arrived in the early morning and hadstarted circling the graves.90

The forensic archeologists of the EAAF defended themselves againstMadres' criticism by stating that it was their main objective 'to give back aname and a history to those who have been robbed of both.'91 To supporttheir activities, the archeologists even used philosophical arguments andargued that burial and care for the dead have been around since pre-historyand characterize what it means to be human. Even after natural disasters orwars, they stated, people generally try to bury those who had perished or atleast try to honor them with symbolic tombs.92

Despite these arguments, the Madres never stopped rejecting exhumations, and their attitude sometimes has been frighteningly consistent. On8 July 2005, the remains of the three Madres who were abducted duringthe dictatorship turned up totally unexpectedly almost three decades aftertheir disappearance. The Madres were perplexed and had to assemble forquite some time to decide what to do. In a press conference a few days later,they explained their position. After reminding the press that they wouldnever consider the desaparecidos to be dead, they stated that they wouldrespect the decision of the relatives of their former fellows. The Madres asa collective, however, would not participate in the funeral or in any ritualsconnected to death. No, they did not need dead bodies to know what happened. The truth they already knew and their children and fellows had tobe considered 'desaparecidos forever'-desaparecidos para siempre. 93 Themessage was repeated on the Plaza de Mayo that same afternoon:

We told [the press] that the Madres are going to respect absolutely whatthe daughters of our comrades decide, but that the white headscarf,

.)f) I1ZSlory, lVlemory, ana Mare-,)ponsorea vtotence

this one who bears not the name of one person but the names of morethan 200.000 desaparecidos in the whole of Latin America, will neverbe associated with death. That death, according to us, has nothing todo with the headscarf. For all this, we will not participate in any ceremony that has to do with death, burial or posthumous honoring, eventhough it would be for our comrades.94

What counts for burial and post-humous honoring also counted for monuments and museums. In the mid-1990s, a conflict arose about the destination of the former clandestine detention center ESMA in Buenos Aires.After the dictatorship, the ESMA remained property of the navy, and thebuilding continued to function as a school for military officers. However,no building in Argentina symbolized state terror more than this one. Beginning in the early 1990s, the ESMA became the scene of a series of scandals.95 In May 1993, an elite private school announced that it would usethe playing fields of the ESMA for its sports activities. It was widely knownthat these playing fields had served for the burning of scores of corpsesand some parents, including the relative of a desaparecido, objected to thearrangement. But the school held firm, and later on other schools startedusing the playing fields too.

In 1995, the navy's attempts to put some accused murderers and torturers up for promotion kept the ESMA in the news. That same year theremains of at least six persons were found in a garbage bin belonging tothe ESMA. Specialists confirmed that the bones most probably belonged todesaparecidos, but the navy refused to give any comment.

It is in this context that the Madres started organizing protest actions atthe gates of the former detention center. In the mid-1990s, in front of theESMA, the Madres developed their most pronounced spectral discourse.Hebe de Bonafini's speech on the occasion of the 19'11 birthday of the coupreads like a classical ghost story:

Of course, the corpses kept appearing. Today, at that many years ofdistance, they return! And return! And return! And those corpses thatappeared that time on the beaches of Santa Teresita, they were theproof that our children return, they return in each one who cries out,they return in each one who protests, they return in each of yoU!96

Around the same period, two other issues grabbed the attention of theMadres: 'the battle over lists' and the juridical invention of the 'truth trials.'The discussion about the lists of the victims of state terror started after confessions about the navy's death flights brought the past back on the publicagenda. Some human rights groups asked President Menem to make use ofhis position as commander in chief and demand that the military provide alist of all people executed during the 'dirty war.' The request was first vetoedby the government and the military, and later the existence of the lists was

denied, but eventually, after lots of international and domestic pressure, alist was published in the major newspapers on 1 April 1995. The result disappointed and insulted the relatives: The list only contained 545 names,and no information was provided about the ultimate fate of the victims.97

The issue also embittered the relations between the different factions ofthe human rights movement. The Madres rejected the idea of lists because,according to them, it coincided with a government strategy aiming to 'finishthe whole issue of the desaparecidos, transforming them into dead people.'98In a speech held in the city of Neuquen, Hebe de Bonafini expressed herregret that some mothers had asked for lists, and she stated that the Madres'struggle was collective and that the names did not matter because they hadphotos. The speech once again ended with an elaboration on the theme ofthe ghostly return of the desaparecidos: 'They threw them into the sea butthey returned. They burned them but they returned. They threw them intodungeons but they returned. They tortured them but they returned.'99

Despite the failed attempt to obtain lists, a group of attorneys associatedwith the human rights group CELS kept pressuring the government, arguing that the relatives have the right to attain information. Because there wasno possibility of punishment of perpetrators after the combined amnestylaws of both Alfonsin and Menem, CELS strived for a new kind of courtproceeding that would not condemn but would search for truth. They builttheir case on a trio of humanitarian considerations: 'the inalienable rightto the truth, the obligation to respect the body, and the right to mournthe dead.' The CELS team not only used legal sources but also referredto literature and world history to support their claims about the universalneed for funeral rites: the burial rituals of the Neanderthals, Philippe Aries'cultural history of death, and even Sophocles' Antigone. lOo The Madresdenounced the truth trials as a juridical trap. They were agitated that theidea was proposed by human rights groups and that it was supported byseveral mothers and relatives. lo1

In the late 1990s, the Madres protested against the plan to build a memory park in Buenos Aires. In 1999, they sent a letter to the initiators of theproject that 'if necessary [they] would use pickax, hammers and chisels toerase the names [of their disappeared children] listed on this monument.'IOlThe Parque de la Memoria would be realized eventually but only partiallyand with several years of delay. Looking back on the event some years later,the Madres explain once more why they took this stance on monumentsand post-humous honoring. The Madres definitely resist oblivion, but it isstriking how remembrance for them always has to serve justice and shouldnever be considered a goal on its own. As they put it: 'He who does notforgive does not forget, but he who only says that he does not forget oftenforgives.'lo3 The central opposition, moreover, according to the Madres, isnot between remembrance and oblivion but between oblivion and a certainkind of memory that they call memoria fertil ('fertile memory')-a memorythat feeds the thirst and hunger for justice:


Like the economic reparations, the amnesty laws or the recuperationof accomplices of the genocide in elected positions in the 'democracy,'oblivion is another variety of impunity. The Madres have the recipe of'fertile memory' in order to fight oblivion. This fertile memory of theMadres considers the value of life to be supreme, secures the rehabilitation of the desaparecidos as activists and tries to build bridges to newgenerations of solidary and militant men and women.104

The Madres' memoria {ertil found less barren grounds after the changeof the millennium with the coming of President Nestor Kirchner (20032007). The Madres are happy about the annulment of some of the amnestylaws and the renewed prosecutions of military officers for violations thatwere perpetrated almost three decades ago. In March 2004, Kirchner presided over a ceremony during which the portraits of former junta leaderswere removed from the walls of the ESMA. On the same day, the presidentannounced that the military college would be expropriated and turned intoa memorial. lOS Six years earlier, in 1998, the Madres had strongly protestedagainst President Menem's plan to demolish the ESMA and build a monument of national reconciliation on the cleared site. This time, after the necessary negotiations, they supported the plans for the ESMA.106

On the 30th anniversary of the coup, in 2006, the Madres felt victorious: At last the state recognized its responsibilities, and finally it engagedin a political instead of an economical form of reparation. In a specialissue of their Peri6dico Mensual, the result of three decades of struggle isreviewed:

Since the day when the actual office holder, only recently installed inthe Casa Rosada, toppled the military leadership, he started a long listof political deeds with high symbolic and historical relevance whichhonor the painstakingly sustained position of the Madres against economical reparations, parks of memory, exhumations of corpses andthe CONADEP. [... ] Thirty years passed, but 'Aparici6n con Vida'formulated by the Madres drastically defeated the 'Nunca Mas' by Sabato and Congress.107

'APARICI6N CON VIDA.' A HISTORY OF A SLOGAN

How to understand the Madres' radical and often estranging stances onthe legacy of the state terror? What to make of the spectral language manifested in the expressions 'desaparecido para siempre' and 'aparici6n convida'? What can this latter expression mean when the Madres firmly contrast it with the internationally celebrated phrase 'Nunca Mas,' which theydenounce as an empty Alfonsinist slogan? As I stated at the beginning ofthis chapter, the discourse of the Madres primarily has to be seen as a form

-La lVluene 1\1.0 I:,Xlsre :>7

of resistance against the irreversible time of history with its stress on theabsence or distance of the past and the way this chronosophy was used tosustain the long reign of impunity in Argentina.

To grasp the Madres' 'invention' of the spectral figure of the desaparecido, we have to look at the origin and transformation of the demand forliving appearance. The Madres situate their first public usage of the phrase'aparici6n con vida' in the early 1980s. The immediate occasion for theslogan came when the human rights activist Emilio Mignone (of the CELSorganization) during a visit to Europe proclaimed that the desaparecidoswere dead. The Madres reacted by publishing a document that asked for theliving appearance of the desaparecidos.10 8 The question of the status of thedisappeared would become a major breaking point within the human rightsmovement. Already before the end of the transition ro democracy, most ofthe professional human rights organizations refused to march under the'aparici6n con vida' banner because they considered it an unreasonable oreven irrational demand.

For quite some time, many relatives indeed, against all odds, kept hoping that the desaparecidos would be found alive. Yet, there was more to theaparici6n con vida-demand than just hope against hope. For the Madres,holding firm to this demand became a radical way to react to the attitude anddiscourse of both the military government and its democratic successors.

Initially, the Madres' requests to the military had been framed mostlyin terms of the right to truth. In 1977, the first ad placed in a paper aboutthe desaparecidos had been titled Solo pedimos la verdad-'We only askfor the truth.'lo9 On other occasions, the request for truth was even backedby an argument about the universal human need to mourn the dead. InApril 1979, the Madres sent a document to several international powerholders, including the UN, the government of the United States, and thePope, in which they expressed the exceptional pain of the relatives of thedesaparecidos:

The abducted remain deprived of any identity, one does not knowwhether they are dead or alive, and in the latter case whether they aredetained and where. This generates ambiguities of all kinds, of whichthe psychological injuries are the gravest results. The relatives end uprelating themselves to absences which convert into 'ghosts.' [ ... ] Onehas to confront the absence, which, because of its extreme painfulness,is not a common process of mourning. It is a 'mourning without object.' It is emptiness, absolute loss, death without a corpse and withoutburial [... ] All these twisted relations are caused by this barbarous actof abduction. The families ask for the truth in order to be able to cometo terms with it.11o

Forced into a defensive position, the leaders of the second junta soon reactedby denying the whole phenomenon of the disappearances. In a speech given


in May 1979, General Viola claimed that the military had fought and wona non-conventional war that inevitably produced losses:

This war, like all wars, leaves some aftereffects, great wounds thattime, and only time, can heal. They are caused by the losses; the dead,the wounded, the detained, the ones 'forever absent.'ll1

The message was clear: Time would solve everything, and there was noghostly presence of desaparecidos, there only were eternal absences'ausentes para siempre.' That the military came to understand the troublingpower of the desaparecidos' spectrality, however, was clearly manifestedin a series of laws that were subsequently issued. These laws declared thedeath of all persons who disappeared longer than a few months, and thelaws were presented as a gesture of philanthropy because they allegedlyenabled the relatives to go on with their lives.

By 1980, even the representatives of some democratic parties starteddenying the (spectral) existence of the desaparecidos. In the middle of Aprilthat year, the president of the Union Civica Radical, Ricardo Balbfn, infamously stated on the Spanish television that in Argentina there were nodesaparecidos, only the deceased:

Everybody knows that the desaparecidos are dead persons, but a country cannot live with phantoms/phantasies [(antasmas]. It has to dealwith realities, however hard they are. We prefer mothers crying overtheir dead and not begging, like it is now, for an answer, which thosewho have to give it, deny them because it is impossible to give.1l2

The Madres were furious about these statements. In an open letter theyasked for Balbfn's sources and stated that they were not begging for answersbut had the right to demand them in the name of justice.113

The juntas went on declaring that the desaparecidos did not exist orwere really 'normal' dead, particularly when they felt that their reign wasapproaching its end.114 To understand how the declarations of death aimedto provoke a closure to the dirty war 'episode,' it is interesting to analyzea little more closely the so called 'final document' that was issued on 28April 1983 and in which the military offered a historical contemplationon its 'war on subversion and terrorism.'115 'This historical synthesis ofa painful and still nearby past,' one of the first sentences goes, 'wants tobe a message of faith and recognition about the struggle for freedom, forjustice and the right to life.' A little further the following statements aremade: 'The moment has come to direct ourselves to the future: it will benecessary to mitigate the wounds that each war produces, to confront withChristian spirit the new epoch that initiates and to look toward tomorrowwith humility.' The military knows its place in history. It was asked by theArgentine people to fight a war on subversion, an assignment it proudly

'La Muerte No Existe" 41

accomplished and that is now past. But, the military chief adds in a waythat strangely resembles the influential Nunca Mas slogan: The experiencewas a bitter one that 'should never happen again.'

The document continues with a narration of the events of the 'dirty war'and then for the first time implicitly mentions the desaparecidos or, better,their non-existence: 'Many died in open confrontations with the government forces, others committed suicide to evade their capture, some desertedand had to hide from both the authorities and their own gangs.'116 Themilitary makes clear that there is no such thing as the spectral existenceof the desaparecidos. At most there are 'unidentified dead,' people whodied or persons who simply never existed. Moreover, it is assured, all thosewho were killed in action but could not be identified were legally buried inanonymous graves.

The whole text can be considered as an act of closure, which draws toone central conclusion: The 'dirty war' belongs to history and the nationwants to look forward for better times, 'that it is the wish of the wholenation to put a full stop [punto final] to a painful period in our history, inorder to begin, in unity and freedom, the definitive constitutional institutionalization of the republic."17 In the final sentences, the junta leaders talkabout memory and reconciliation in a tone that can hardly be discernedfrom that of the average truth commission: 'Reconciliation is the difficultbeginning of an era of maturity and responsibility, assumed with realismby all. The scars are a painful memory, but also the cement of a powerfuldemocracy, of united and free people.'118 In anticipation of criticism, theyend by stating that 'only the judgment of history can exactly determine towhom the direct responsibility for the unjust methods and the innocentdeaths belong.'119

During the first days of the reemergence of democracy, references to theneed for closure and reconciliation disappeared from the public discoursefor a while, but soon the democratic government developed a discoursethat sometimes closely resembled that of the military. In a sense, bothjunta leaders and subsequent democratic leaders shared similar conceptions of the past as something that had to be left behind and subordinatedto the interests of the present and the future. By the end of his period inoffice, Alfonsfn stated that Argentina could not survive if it did not freeitself from the burden of the past. 12O Similarly, Menem cloaked his infamous amnesty laws in a historical discourse that talked about the closing of 'chapters' and claimed that the amnesty aimed at the 'painstakingand delicate task of closing bitter and painful stages [etapas] in Argentinenational life.'121 Less than a week before he announced his first amnestylaw in 1989, Menem staged a bizarre ceremony in which the corpse ofGeneral Juan Manuel de Rosas was repatriated and placed in a familytomb in Buenos Aires more than 112 years after his death.122 Rosas hadbeen a prominent figure in the civil conflict of the mid-nineteenth century;he had fled Argentina after a military defeat and subsequently became


the subject of conflicting historical interpretations that kept provokinganimosities until well into the twentieth century. The symbolic reburial,according to Menem, was of great historical significance for the nationalreconciliation of all Argentines; it would close the century-old wounds ofthe past and put an end to intolerance.m Although he did not explicitlyrefer to the 'dirty war,' it was clear to everybody, and certainly to theMadres, that Menem's real political objective was not to rehabilitate anineteenth-century general but to bury the fresher and far more explosivememories of the recent period of state terror.

When General Martin Balza, in 1995, eventually came to offer apologies for the 'dirty war' crimes committed in the name of the armed forces,his speech revolved around a discourse that once again recalls the initialreaction of the military. All the dead have to be respected, but the debtshave been cleared, and the only thing that really counts is truth. Moreover, he claims, 'in the history of nations, even that of the most cultivatednations, there exist harsh, obscure and quasi inexplicable epochs.' Thepast therefore has to be left behind, Balza stated, for 'if we do not succeedin closing the wounds and in performing-the labor of mourning, we willnot have a future.' 124

Soon after the first public denials of the existence of the desaparecidosstarting in 1979 and the first claims that there only were 'normal' dead or'ausentes para siempre,' the Madres learned that they had to change theirstrategy: From then on they would no longer only ask for the truth; theyalso would start to demand living appearance and would refuse to fulfillthe traditional task of mourning. They refused to assume the attitude of'hired mourners.'125 As we remarked at the beginning of this chapter, theMadres' refusal to mourn often has been considered irrational or even a signof madness. As Oscar Abudara Bini, an Argentine psychiatrist and fellowtraveler of the Madres, remarks, for the faithful readers of Freud's 'Mourning and Melancholia,' there were only two possibilities for the relatives ofthe disappeared to cope with the past: The first one was the normal andnatural process of mourning that recognizes the loss, and the other one wasevidently pathological and deliriously denied the loss. After three decadesof struggle, however, Abudara Bini claims, the Madres' position forces achange of perspective in both psychopathology and jurisprudence, and, inretrospect, the question can be raised who has been crazy.126 Another commentator notes the Madres changed the political significance of reburialsand even the spiritual meaning of human remains in a way that clashedhead on with the cultural constitution of Argentine society with its strongCatholic influences.m

What might have started, then, as desperate hope against hope quicklyturned into a powerful strategic and normative stance. As one motherputs it, 'the truth is we know they've killed them. Aparici6n con vidameans that although the majority of them are dead, no one has taken

La LVluene l'1lU £')(,1"/1" .,.J

responsibility for their deaths, because no one has said who killed them,who gave the order.'!28 Or as Hebe De Bonafini explains, 'We know whathappened. We are not mad, we do not ask impossible things. Aparici6ncon vida is an ethical slogan in principle. As long as one single murdererremains on the streets, our children will live to condemn them'129 And onthe same subject, she adds somewhere else: '[Why do] they like the dead?Because death is final.'13o

CONCLUSION: THE TIME OF THE DESAPARECIDOS

The human rights activism of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo is clearlyrelated to a specific concept of time. Grasping this concept is not an easytask, however, because the Madres remain a practically oriented movementthat does not often dwell on abstract issues such as time. Luckily there aresome sources that can grant us an insight. In 1999, the Madres decidedto set up the Universidad Popular Madres de Plaza de Mayo (UPMPM), apopular university that strives to 'join together theory and practice' and tofunction as a 'new space of resistance.'!31 The UPMPM organizes a courseon the philosophy of history, but the most interesting sources for our scrutiny of the Madres' conception of time and history are to be found in aseries of inaugural lectures and in a course named 'History of the Madresde Plaza de Mayo.' This latter course gives an overview of the evolution ofthe movement. Interestingly, it starts with a 'methodological unit' called'Memory, Past and History,' which differentiates between distinct uses ofhistory ranging from 'history as an active relation to the past' to 'history asa discourse of hegemonic power.' In order for the students to attain a critical concept of history, some obligatory literature is given; the list includesSpanish translations of works by Car/os Marx, Eric Hobsbawm, EdwardThompson, and Jean Chesneaux and also two texts by the organizers ofthe course themselves.m One of these is an article by Ines Vazquez titled'Aspects of Memory and Culture in Post-dictatorship Argentina.')33

The article begins by quoting some passages of Jorge Luis Borges' story'Funes el memorioso,' which tells the history of a man who after an accident acquires the capacity to remember everything, including the mosttrivial detail, but because of this condition can no longer think or reason.Post-dictatorship remembrance in Argentina, Vazquez argues, is a remembrance of exhaustive (horrendous) details that, just like Borges' protagonist, suffers an incapacity to deliver explanations. Once more the NuncaMas report by the CONADEP serves as the most prominent example ofthis failure. The author complains that this type of remembrance treats the'permanent actuality of the horror effected by the impunity' as somethingthat is already past, as something that occurred in 'another time than theone of today.' The result is that society starts to 'remember' even in situations where the 'temporal logic,' according to Vazquez, clearly demands


'perception and action.' In some cases, she states, 'the demand of remembrance (while in reality what is asked for is justice), appears immediately,practically attached to the crime.'134 To illustrate this, Vazquez discussesthe case of the Argentine reporter Jose Luis Cabezas, who was murderedon 25 January 1996 and for whom protesters two days later on the 27th

already shouted, 'Let's not forget about Cabezas.' In contrast to thedetailed 'memory of horror,' the author states, 'we start with the idea thatwhat is called the 'Argentine past' never came to be so, never ended happening, never had an end.'135 To resume, two forms of remembrance existaccording to Vazquez: One recalls everything exhaustively in the style ofFunes or Nunca Mas but remembers it by saying 'this is already past'; theother is the form adopted by the Madres, who stress continuity and arecapable of saying, 'This is what we are.' It should be clear that the articlealso implicitly discusses two radically different conceptions of time, butVazquez treats the matter of time more explicitly in a seminar organized inpreparation of the creation of the popular university.136 There she remarksthat the Madres' weekly circular march was held counter-clockwise inorder to symbolize their defiance, and she pointedly states that their protest necessarily conflicts with the general idea of temporal linearity andhistorical progress. The Madres' struggle emanates a 'circular' or even'simultaneous' time.

If, as we have seen, circularity in general offers us another mode ofrepresenting time, distinct of the irreversible layering/spreading [escalonamiento irreversible] of past, present and future, the physical circularity that the Madres present to us enables the integration of thesethree instances that are established by dominant culture to producethe illusion of temporal order. An integration that we could describe asfollows: while we walk around the pyramid, the desaparecidos, (boundto the past in the classical conception of time and the thought of theestablishment) are here again.137

Vazquez regrets that circular temporality has so often had negative associations in Western thought and that the broader political left in Argentina hasfailed to adopt the time concept of the Madres.

Some did try to adapt the Madres' peculiar politics of time to societaland political issues that exceed the direct involvement with the politics ofmemory. One of these attempts can be found in the concept of the 'sociallydisappeared' (desaparecidos sociales), coined by Alfredo Moffat in anotherof the lectures held in preparation of the establishment of the PopularUniversity. In Argentina, Moffat claims, certain social groups, includingindigenous people, African slaves, creoles, street children, homeless people,and psychiatric patients, have always been made to disappear from society.'Social desaparecidos' are the 'living dead': neither alive nor really dead.Just like 'political desaparecidos,' Moffat writes, 'social desaparecidos' are

negated, denied any history, and made invisible. In the words of Moffat,they are condemned to an existence in 'another time and another space.'

The relation between time and the struggle of the Madres is also brieflyconsidered in still another of the preparatory lectures. Enrique Mad, oneof Argentina's most prominent legal philosophers, claims that time is anessentially human experience that cannot be reduced to a simple physical reality.m Time, he argues, has to be the object of a collective strugglethat aims to construct it in a way that resists linearity, succession, and thesimple accumulation of days in which past, present, and future exist without interconnection.

The three commentators are of course right: The struggle of the Madreshas involved a struggle over time all along. More than just posing a formidable political challenge to Argentine society, the Madres' refusal to perform the labor of mourning, their resistance to closure, and their claim thatthe ghostlike desaparecidos will never be a matter of the past constitute afrontal attack on the prevalent modern concepts of time and history. Hebede Bonafini formulates this challenge straightforwardly in some concluding remarks to the series of preparatory lectures. In a highly rhetoricalpassage, she recalls an incident that took place at the time of the JuntaTrial. In the courtroom, one of the judges had asked her to put away herwhite headscarf, but she refused because the accused were allowed to weartheir military uniforms. The Spanish expression used by the judge had been'archivese,' and now the president of the Madres states that it is exactlythis 'archivese'-translatable as 'put it away' but also as 'put it into thearchives'-which signifies the compromise that the democratic politiciansmade with the military, the judges, the clergy, and the bureaucratic syndicates: 'This 'archivese' is the impunity, the pardon, the disgrace.'139

The Madres' 'memoria tertii,' indeed, not only resists oblivion but alsoopposes all forms of 'historical' remembrance that conceive of the past as aclosed entity that is removed from the present and only can be conserved byarchiving its traces. For more than thirty years now, they resisted closure,and the protest against 'death' as a master metaphor of modern history isone of the most important features of their struggle. Because they fear thatthe presumed inferior ontological status of the 'dead' past (in comparisonwith the 'living' present) facilitates its neglect and, thus, impunity, they havesubstituted it for a representation that stresses spectral presence. The onlyway to appreciate the full extent of the contrast between the famous NuncaMds slogan and the Madres' less well-known Aparici6n con vida is by seeing them as founded in two conflicting conceptions of time and history.

3 'We the Victims and SurvivorsDeclare the Past to Be in the Present'The 'New South Africa'and the Legacy of Apartheid

The past is history, we can not recreate or change it.

General M. Malan 1

... Your torments are knownBy those bones that are still callingBut you know that it is the past which is in the presentAnd that certain heads are haunted with uneasinessAbout the truths you seek.

Z. Mkhize, Khulumani Support Group2

INTRODUCTION

The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC; 19962003) has received much praise internationally.3 All over the world, commentators have celebrated it as a legal innovation and a solution to thehard dilemmas involved in dealing with the painful past in post-conflictsituations. The commissioners of the TRC indeed claim to have created aformula that successfully dealt with the legacy of Apartheid while avoidingboth impunity and vengeance. Its chair Desmond Tutu and vice-chair AlexBoraine have travelled around the globe to share their experiences. AfricanNational Congress (ANC) parliamentary Johnny De Lange proudly statedthat South Africa was the first nation to create a truth commission by anAct of parliament after a public and participatory process.4 Moreover, headds, the South African TRC represented a unique blend of both traditional and contemporary ways of dealing with historical injustice. In hiswords the TRC combined features of both the 'justice model' that aimsat accountability through prosecution and the 'reconciliation model' thatexists in countries like Chile, where truth commissions have been combinedwith general amnesties. The secret formula of the South African TRC,according to its commissioners and international commentators alike, is

'We the Victims and Survivors Declare the Past to Be in the Present' 47

that it resisted a general or blanket amnesty by making amnesty conditional on a full disclosure of the historical truth. The revelation of thistruth, it is claimed, leads to a process of healing and national reconciliationand even contributes to 'restorative' justice by securing remembrance. s As aprominent South African judge expresses the idea, 'The public and officialexposure of the truth, especially if the perpetrator is a part of that process,is itself an important form of justice.'6 The South African arrangement,it is claimed, was not an amnesty that equals amnesia but was a 'publicamnesty' that, according to those who granted it, was 'something more andless than the objectionable norm.'7

The TRC, according to its commissioners, engaged in Milan Kundera's'struggle of memory against forgetting.'8 Alex Boraine quotes the famousline by George Santayana that 'those who forget the past are condemnedto repeat it,' and he reminds his readers about the old Jewish wisdom that'to remember is the secret of redemption.'9 Reflecting on his work in thecommission, Boraine writes that he is 'unashamed in [his] belief that, inthe South African context, history has to be rewritten and that the TRChas made a significant contribution to this end.'lO Similarly, Desmond Tutustates that the TRC's contribution to a new historiography is one of thegreatest legacies of the commission, which tries to offer 'a road map tothose who wish to travel into our past.'1l 'We can still claim, without fear ofbeing contradicted,' Tutu writes, 'that we have contributed more to uncovering the truth about the past than all the court cases in the history ofapartheid.'12 Supporters of the TRC indeed argue that a truth commissionis better suited to produce historical truth than any court or tribunal: Justlike 'processes of criminal justice suffer if made to bear the weight of history,' equally so 'history suffers if viewed through a judicial lens.'13 Onecommentator similarly argues that the most important feature of the TRC'sfinal report is that, unlike juridical decisions, it does not represent a 'finalpoint' and cannot be reduced to a narration of 'forensic truth.' With greatenthusiasm she declares that 'the TRC represents probably one of the mostinteresting remembrance spaces (lieu de la memoire) of our time.'14

Yet, the abundant praise that has been heaped on the TRC internationally stands in sharp contrast with its general reception in South Africaitself. Ever since its conception, the TRC has encountered a wide rangeof criticism. Not surprisingly, it was criticized by those who favored forgetting and who claimed that the opening up of 'old wounds' endangersthe future. Likewise, the TRC expected politically inspired critiques thatasserted that its final report is biased and that not all parties were dealtwith evenhandedly or, to the contrary, that its evenhandedness failed todifferentiate between the immorality of Apartheid and the morality of thestruggle against it.L' Another series of critiques was directed at the amnestyarrangement and the notion of reconciliation included in the mandate ofthe TRC. The amnesty arrangement was never supported by the majorityof the South African public; and it became the subject of some of the most


serious legal challenges faced by the TRC. 16 Moreover, not everyone wasconvinced by the commission's rhetoric about 'restorative' justice or about'revealing is healing,' and several commentators have questioned whetherthere actually exists any direct positive relation between truth revelationand reconciliation as the TRC c1aimsY In addition to these criticisms onthe political and ethical aspects of the TRC, several scholars, includingsome historians, harshly criticized the findings it produced, rejected its alltoo-narrow focus, and spoke about a 'diminished truth.'li

Most discomfortingly, however, commentators have claimed that theTRC suffers a short memory span and that it potentially facilitates socialamnesia instead of forging a new collective memory.19 This idea underliesseveral of the critiques, but it was formulated most notably by Jacques Derrida. Derrida caused a stir when during a visit to South Africa in 1998 heexpressed his fear that the TRC risked turning into an 'exercise in forgetting.' The TRC's production of an archive on Apartheid, he claimed, justlike any archive produces memory and forgetting at the same time: 'WhenI handwrite something on a piece of paper,' his reasoning went, 'I put it inmy pocket or in the safe, it's just in order to forget it, to know that I can findit again while in the meantime having forgotten it.'20 Derrida's statementswere taken seriously, and Verne Harris, director of the South African History Archive and one-time member of TRC's investigation team, even concludes that the commission was an instrument of the state, 'providing a nodat remembering in the interests of a profounder forgetting.'21 Three SouthAfrican historians argue that the TRC's desire to create a new national pastwas tempered by its fear of disturbing the 'cemetery of history,' and theyspeak about a paradoxical mechanism in which the past is simultaneouslyexposed and submerged or exhumed and (re)buried.n Others, too, claimthat the idea of forgiveness aimed at forgetting or that the TRC displayedan 'amnesiac rhetoric,' which always risks producing amnesia. 23

While the critiques about the dimensions of amnesia in the TRC areto be taken seriously, it would, of course, be undesirable if they obscuredthe enormous differences between the work of the TRC and the state-imposed amnesia that existed under Apartheid rule. As Verne Harris himselfremarks, the 'tool of forgetfulness' was crucial to the Apartheid system,which forcefully eliminated the memory of oppositional voices throughcensorship, banning, detentions, and killing. 24 During the years of thetransition between 1990 and 1994, but also before, records were systematically destroyed to keep certain processes secret, and it has precisely beenpart of the TRC's mandate to investigate these malpractices. Moreover,does not the fundamental TRC concept of making amnesty conditionalon truth revelation rest on the conviction that simple forgetting will nolonger do as a way to deal with the past? Would the leaders of the TRCbe that insincere when they cite Kundera and claim to struggle againstoblivion? It is undesirable to consider the problem of transitional justiceexclusively in terms of a conflict between remembering and forgetting. A


more productive starting point, it seems to me, is created by Heidi Grunebaum-Ralph, who claims that the TRC's relation to the past should beanalyzed as one that actively creates an opposition between 'proper' and'improper' forms of remembrance. 25

In this chapter I will therefore first argue that the current field of transitional justice is primarily the arena for a conflict between two differingways of remembering that manifest opposite temporal features and thatare often, respectively, referred to as 'history' and 'memory.' The TRC, Iwill claim, engages in a historical discourse in order to have it restore orimpose irreversible historical time and (re)enforce the modernist delineation between past and present that is threatened by a (particular) memorythat resists chronology and refuses to let the past go. In the second part ofthis chapter I will focus on a group of victims and survivors that stronglycriticizes what it calls the 'unfinished business of the TRC: The KhulumaniSupport Group was originally created to facilitate collaboration with thetruth commission, but over the years it has become increasingly critical ofthe TRC's legacy. Interestingly, Khulumani both implicitly and explicitlyquestions the politics of time underlying the TRC, and, in doing so, it develops a chronosophy that bears remarkable resemblances with that of theMadres de Plaza de Mayo. Before proceeding, however, I will first brieflysketch the background of transitional justice and negotiated revolution inSouth Africa against which the TRC has to be understood.

PLACING THE TRC IN THE CONTEXT OFSOUTH AFRICA'S NEGOTIATED REVOLUTION

On 10 May 1994, South Africa was the scene for one of the most significant political events of the late twentieth century. After decades of political struggle against the internationally despised Apartheid system, NelsonMandela was inaugurated as the first president of the democratic SouthAfrica. The event was remarkable because it disproved an almost generalized fatalist thinking about the eventual outcome of the struggle overApartheid that was pervasive both in the country and abroad. Mandela haddone what was thought impossible: With his relentless advocacy of reconciliation and forgiveness, he seemed to have managed to make South Africans break with their past and get the country out of its spiral of violence.

However, the break with the past that so magically took place in therealm of the symbolic would prove to be far more difficult to realize in the'real' South Africa where millions of lives were lived. The task of nationalreconstruction faced by the ANC-Ied democratic government was enormous, and it seemed a virtually impossible challenge for a movement thathad no experience in governing and was given only a minimal time forpreparation. Given the circumstances, the new government booked someremarkable successes in health care, housing projects, electrification


schemes, and extending the network of water supplies in the first yearsafter the transition. 26 Still, the government has not always been able tomeet the expectations of change and progress that live in the South Africanpopulation, and its neo-liberal policies have failed to deliver the promisedimprovements to the average standard of livingY Moreover, many analystsclaim that, despite the formal political changes, a great deal of a moreinformal 'residual apartheid' persists in the 'new South Africa,' and that thebreak with the past has never completely been made. 28

Below I want to focus on one specific aspect of this problematical relationship to the past: the redress of historical injustices and the miserablefate of numerous victims and survivors of Apartheid violence and atrocity.The particulars and peculiarities of transitional justice in South Africa, likein most other transitional countries, are related to the nature of the regimethat perpetrated the historical injustices but also to the specific way inwhich it ended. What took place in South Africa was not a clear-cut victoryof the liberation movement over Apartheid but a 'negotiated revolution' ora 'negotiated settlement.' The transition to democracy was the result of apainful process of compromise, and the actual transition was far removedfrom the dreams that most liberation activists once harbored. Let us therefore take a brief look at the history of the 'rise' and 'fall' of Apartheid.

Although obviously there had been racist and discriminatory laws before,Apartheid as a formal legal system took place in the years between 1948and 1994, when the National Party (NP)-the political embodiment ofwhite Afri kaner nationalism-retained control of government. 29 Startingfrom 1948, Apartheid was constructed in a seemingly endless series ofacts that legally defined and codified racial segregation and discrimination. Some of the earliest legislation scrupulously divided South Africansby race-resulting in the categories of white, colored, Indian, and native orAfrican-and outlawed sexual contact and intermarriages in an attempt topreserve racial purity. A little later the separation logic was extended to allspheres of social life, resulting in separate public transport, bars, cinemas,sports facilities, ete.

The rise of the racist Apartheid system raised lots of protest of course.Despite harsh repression, a massive upsurge of popular protest took placein the 1950s. Most of the protest was organized by the ANC, which alreadyhad been founded in 1912, and later also by the Pan-Africanist Congress(PAC), which broke away from the ANC in 1959. In the early 1950s, theANC in alliance with the South African Communist Party launched the'Defiance Campaign,' which mobilized people for boycotts, strikes, stayaways, and civil disobedience. A few years later the ANC made contactwith a series of other organizations that resisted Apartheid in order tolaunch the National Congress of the People, which in 1955 adopted the'Freedom Charter' that demanded a non-racial South Africa that wouldbelong to everyone living in it.


In 1960 the spiral of popular protest and state repression culminated inthe bloody Sharpeville massacre, during which police fire killed sixty-nine

. people and wounded 180. The Sharpeville shootings led to a dramatic waveof protest that impelled the government to declare a State of Emergency,ban both the ANC and the PAC, and arrest most of the leaders of bothgroups. Despite international protest, Sharpeville did not destabilize theNational Party; its electoral strength actually increased, and during the1960s it initiated a second phase of Apartheid based on the system of socalled 'Separate Development.'

Toward the mid-1970s, economic recession started to trouble the Apartheid system and, at the same time, resulted in a labor conflict that renewedblack resistance. It was in this context of heightened tensions that theSoweto uprising started in June 1976 after police opened fire on a marchof schoolchildren, killing and wounding several of them. A series of boycotts, school burnings, attacks, and counterattacks followed, and by theend of the year, underestimated official numbers listed 575 dead and 2,389wounded. Once again the events provoked international protest, but thistime things did start to change. For the first time, Apartheid started trembling, and the new Afrikaner leaders became convinced that the model ofSeparate Development had to be changed. In the late 1970s, Prime Minister (and later President) P. W. Botha argued that South Africa was victimof a total onslaught by internal and external enemies and that it thereforeneeded a 'total strategy' to fight those enemies. The strategy failed, however, and by the 1980s the country became the scene of a virtual civil warthat caused much bloodshed but that neither side seemed able to win. Itbecame clear that the stalemate could only be broken if the two sides of theconflict would negotiate a way out.

During the late 1980s, there already had been semi-clandestine meetings between groups of Afrikaner intellectuals and business leaders andthe ANC leadership in exile, but the first decisive steps toward negotiationstook place in May 1988, when government officials secretly met the stillimprisoned Nelson Mandela. 30 For about two years the Botha governmentmaintained this contact, but things really started moving when Botha wasreplaced by F. W. de Klerk. Wittingly or unwittingly, de Klerk launched anunstoppable process of reform when, on 2 February 1990, he announcedthe release of Mandela and hundreds of other political prisoners and liftedthe ban on a range of liberation movements. On 11 February 1990, Mandela indeed was released. Soon the liberation movements returned fromexile, and in May that same year the first official negotiations opened away to constitutional reform. The question of who would draft the newconstitution was hotly debated, and it was under Mandela's influence thatan all-party congress, the 'Convention for a Democratic South Africa'(CODESA), was chosen as the forum for the first phase of the negotiations. 31 The CODESA started working in December 1991, but it soon facedserious problems that would result in a series of crises and eventually in a


collapse. By mid-1992 the convention broke down, and after a bloody massacre at Boipatong, the ANC accused the National Party of complicity anddecided to break off negotiations.

It took months of diplomatic pressure before the ANC agreed to entera renewed session of bilateral negotiations. An important step forwardwas realized after it was agreed that a government of national unity wouldfunction within an interim constitution. The breakthrough came from anunexpected source: Joe Slovo, the leader of the South African Communist Party, wrote a document in which he argued that certain compromisescould be made at the negotiating table as long as they did not block orpermanently defer the future installation of non-racial democratic rule.One of the compromises proposed by Slovo was a 'sunset' clause, whichwould provide compulsory power-sharing for a fixed number of years. 32

Slovo also tried to solve another roadblock in the negotiation process, onerelated to the issue of transitional justice. De Klerk's National Party wasabsolutely clear about the fact that it would only accept a settlement thatincluded a blanket amnesty for all its members and for all the personnel ofthe army, police, and secret services. This was unacceptable for the liberation movements, but the issue was continually deferred by both sides. Slovoproposed to take the issue out of the constitutional discussion and leave itto the future interim government, but to make a public commitment to theNP, 'indicating now that, as part of such a government, we will support ageneral amnesty in which those seeking to benefit will disclose in full thoseactivities for which they require an amnesty.'33 Amnesty remained a sourceof conflict, however, and all negotiations on the subject failed, so that itindeed was not included in the interim constitution that was adopted on18 November 1993. Nevertheless, at the last minute of the negotiations, apostscript was attached to the constitution, which brought up the issue ofpolitical amnesty after all. 34

The postscript did not mention anything like a truth commission, butits stress on the importance of national reconciliation and 'understanding'and its statement that some judicial mechanism was needed to deal with theamnesties created an opening that would later allow for the establishmentof the TRC. First, however, a lot of thinking and lobbying were required. InANC circles, this process was already started in 1992 by Kader Asmal, whooften is considered the TRC's intellectual father. Asmal, like most othermembers of the ANC, initially hoped that all perpetrators would be punished after the fall of Apartheid, but just like Slovo, he soon came to believethat this was not a realistic option. In a lecture delivered at the Universityof the Western Cape, Asmal enumerated a variety of options for managing the past, referring to countries like Argentina, Chile, Russia, and EastGermany, and he warned that the past had to be taken seriously as it holdsthe key to the future. 35 Asmal admitted that 'Our road of change throughnegotiations is inconsistent with the idea of a Nuremberg-type trial of those


who were in government [... ].' 'Nevertheless,' he wrote, 'we cannot affordto close the book on those government agents guilty of the most heinouscrimes, who continue to order killings.' 'Even lawyers,' Asmal stated, 'mustrecognise that history cannot simply be sealed off when a chapter such asthe one we are leaving comes to an end, and certainly not when to do sowould be to ignore the suffering and injustice done to millions.' Therefore,the painful past had to be acknowledged, and the democratic forces had to'ensure that memory is victorious.'

Around the same time, the NGO community too began thinking aboutthe formula of a truth commission. In 1992, the 'Institute for a DemocraticAlternative for South Africa' (IDASA)-of which Alex Boraine was thedirector-organized a trip to some Eastern European countries in order tostudy societies in transition from totalitarianism to democracy.36 In 1993and 1994, IDASA organized two conferences at which experts from allover the world were invited to share their experiences about transitionaljustice.37 IDASA's initiatives helped to bring the discussion on the truthcommission to a wide range of civil society groups, and it was the lobbyingof these groups that ensured that the TRC eventually became an open andpublic process instead of one that took place behind closed doors.

The actual legal foundation for the TRC was provided by the 'Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act,' which was issued by thegovernment of national unity in]uly 1995. As a product of compromise, itswording was complex and its content ambiguous. Nevertheless, the document clearly assigned a three-fold mandate to the TRC: first, it had to draw'as complete a picture as possible of the nature, causes, and extent of grossviolations of human rights committed during the period from 1 March1960 to the cut-off date contemplated in the Constitution'; second, it hadto grant selective amnesties to perpetrators of politically motivated crimeson the condition that they disclosed the full truth about their crimes; andthird, it had to make recommendations about appropriate reparations forthe victims of Apartheid. 38 Reflecting this three-fold mandate, the TRCwas divided into three subcommittees named the Human Rights ViolationsCommittee, The Amnesty Committee, and the Reparation and Rehabilitation Committee.

As the name of the Act already reveals, the TRC was expected to promote reconciliation, and the legislators essentially saw it as an exercise innation building. In order to encourage reconciliation, the TRC promoteda 'restorative' justice that had to foreground the interests and testimoniesof the 'victims.'39 To that end, the Human Rights Violations Committeebetween 1996 and 1998 gathered almost 23,000 statements and set up aseries of highly visible victim hearings all over the country. Much of theTRC's campaign to win the hearts of the victims and convince them ofthe need for forgiveness was, however, frustrated by the fact that the sameinstitution also had to grant amnesties.


THE TRC AND THE PROBLEM OF THE HAUNTING PAST

Speaking in his personal capacity but claiming to reflect the dominantopinion within the ANC leadership, constitutional judge Albie Sachs, during a symposium in preparation for the TRC, expressed the great expectations about the commission in one powerful sentence: 'It is the creationof a nation.'40 However, as several commentators have noted, the idea ofa direct positive link between the revelation of historical truth and theestablishment of national reconciliation is far from self-evident. Although along tradition conjoins historiography with nation building, the subject ofthis historiography has most often been an ancient and glorious past thatevokes a mythic unity or a common origin. In South Africa, by contrast, asone commentator remarks, history was experienced by the population aseven more divided than the segregated society in which they lived. Insteadof uniting people, history was used as a tool to divide members of society.41In the aftermath of Apartheid, the past remains full of atrocities, shameful,and divisive.

From a nation building perspective, South Africa does not seem to beconfronted with a lack of memory but primarily suffers from what CharlesMaier has termed a 'surfeit of memory,' which continually threatens toregenerate old hatredsY The South African negotiated revolution, according to Erik Doxtader, only succeeded because, in the earliest instance, thenegotiators agreed temporarily to by-pass the memories of the conflict.The negotiators initially defined the concept of reconciliation in terms ofamnesty and amnesia. 'Much more the need to forget the past than the needto forgive, reconciliation was a form of invention that required negotiatorsto bracket history.'43 This, of course, makes the subsequent coupling of reconciliation and historical truth, once the negotiation phase was over, evenmore awkward.44 As Doxtader notes, Mandela himself initially defined reconciliation as a state of affairs in which the 'injustices and grievances of thepast would be buried and forgotten and a fresh start made,' and it took himsome years to revise this belief and to reconcile himself to the idea that thepast could not be left behind.45 The TRC's turn to history, therefore, canhardly be explained by referring merely to a desire to conserve the memories of the past.

Neither can the commission, in contrast to its official rhetoric, beexplained completely by simply referring to its fact-revealing capacity. Thetruth revealed in the final report of the TRC has disappointed many; despitethe claims made by the commissioners, it is hard to see why a similar narration and acknowledgment of history could not be produced in the contextof a tribunal that at the end of the day would also be able to punish the perpetrators. Moreover, as the commissioners themselves admitted, juridicaland political constraints prevented the commission from naming most perpetrators or accomplices and from fully describing the events in which theywere involved.46 As a result, the revelations of the TRC's official reports


appeared bland in comparison to the information previously recorded inthe press, in books, and elsewhere. Referring to the words of Wole Soyinka,it could be argued that the TRC's reports took on the form of a 'proceduralarticulation of the known,' which did little more than acknowledge officially what might be called public secrets.47

Neither did the specific methodology or epistemology of academic history seem of great interest to the TRC, which on the one hand often used astrictly positivist language and on the other hand sometimes stretched itsconcept of truth in order to include personal, social, healing, and restorative truths, which are generally alien to professional historians.48 Nosingle historian was appointed commissioner or held a leading functionin the TRC, and many professional historians initially saw the TRC as adubious, even dangerous, enterprise.49 The historians who did work forthe TRC mostly belonged to the research department, and some membersof this team recount that the 'historical analysis' that they favored led totensions and conflicts with other departments that were populated withlawyers who advocated a more positivist and empiricist approach. Afterfewer than six months, the historians in the commission came to see thattheir dream of writing a 'radical new history' for South Africa would neverbecome reality:

Largely as a result of the many legal requirements built into the Act regarding evidence-prior-warning notices, the making of findings, andthe granting of amnesty, the TRC gradually came to assume the position that it was essentially a state-directed investigative commissionrather than an exercise in writing or rewriting history. [... ] Reluctantly, the researchers accepted the view that the reports of such commissions generally do not contain fine historical or legal analysis anddo not satisfy the academic eye, which judges them to be poor historyor poor law, or both. The subsequent complaint from some academicquarters that the report was lacking in legal, sociological or historicalanalysis was not unexpected. 50

The TRC thus clearly also did not turn to history for its refined methodology.51No, none of that made the TRC so passionately embrace history as a

way to attain national unity and reconciliation. What the truth commissionwas so attracted to was the irreversible time of history and its stress on theabsence or distance of the past. Although the commission draws much of itslegitimacy from positing the idea of remembrance as a form of alternativejustice, the 'sting' must be taken out of memory before it can contribute toforgiveness and national reconciliation, and this 'sting' in the first place issituated in memory's evocation of the irrevocable.52 Desmond Tutu, indeed,refers to the past's 'uncanny habit of returning to haunt one' and the factthat it 'refuses to lay down quietly' as important arguments in favor ofthe truth commission.53 According to the archbishop, the commission was


'charged to unearth the truth about our dark past; to lay the ghosts of thatpast [to rest] so that they may not return to haunt US.'54 The ANC leadership, too, was clear about the fact that it wanted the TRC to free the newdemocracy from the burden of the past by concluding its work as quicklyas possible, 'so that we do indeed let bygones be bygones and al10w thenation to forgive a past it nevertheless dare not forget.'55 Kader Asmal evenevoked the idea of a purifying flood and compared the TRC to a short butpowerful 'cathartic dam-burst' that washes the old away and creates spacefor the new. 56 The request was clearly understood, and the foreword to theTRC's final report of 1998 declares that once having 'looked the beast ofthe past in the eye,' the door on the past had to be shut, so that it would notimprison the 'glorious future.'57 Wole Soyinka therefore rightly notes thatthe truth commission's rejection. of amnesia derives largely from the conviction that remembrance too is amenable to closure. The common groundunderlying most truth commissions, according to Soyinka, is the searchfor what he cal1s the 'cathartic bliss' of closure; the rejection of amnesia infavor of remembering must produce a 'truth that shal1 make free.'58

IRREVERSIBLE TIME OF HISTORY, 'DISTANCE,'AND THE PRODUCTION OF THE OLD

If the formula of the truth commission, then, has any political function inthis context, it is first and foremost to help create a new beginning and abreak with the past at a moment when forgetting no longer seems fit for thisjob. '[The] favoured approach of benign neglect in relation to the legacy ofApartheid,' Kader Asmal writes, 'is certain to guarantee the survival of thepast as an intruder in what ought to be a brighter future. [... ] We cannotjust [say] that the past "is over." The past wil1 never be over unless we movedeliberately and systematical1y to end it.'59 In relation to these needs, historical discourse is used primarily in a performative way in an attempt to'distance' the past and reenforce or impose a break between past and present. The TRC's turn to history, one could argue, forms part of a broaderpolitics of time in which the 'new' South Africa tries to expel the hauntingpast by actively defining what belongs to its (juridical, political, social, cultural, etc.) present and what does not; by defining what is actual, or 'timely'and what must be considered inactual, anachronistic, or old.

This active juxtaposition of the past and the present (or the future), andthe old and the new, already can be discerned in the performative languagethat was used in the postscript to the interim constitution of 1993, whicharranged the amnesty and created the space for the future TRC. It is therefore interesting to take a closer look at its exact wording:

This Constitution provides a historic bridge between the past of a deeplydivided society characterised by strife, conflict, untold suffering and


injustice, and a future founded on the recognition of human rights, democracy and peaceful co-existence and development opportunities foral1 South Africans, irrespective of colour, race, class, belief or sex. Thepursuit of national unity, the well-being of al1 South African citizensand peace, require reconciliation between the people of South Africaand the reconstruction of society. The adoption of this Constitutionlays the secure foundation for the people of South Africa to transcendthe divisions and strife of the past, which generated gross violations ofhuman rights, the transgression of humanitarian principles in violentconflicts and a legacy of hatred, fear, guilt and revenge. These can nowbe addressed on the basis that there is a need for understanding but notfor vengeance, a need for reparation but not for retaliation, a need forubuntu but not for victimisation. In order to advance such reconciliation and reconstruction, amnesty shal1 be granted in respect of acts,omissions and offences associated with political objectives and committed in the course of the conflicts of the past. To this end, Parliamentunder this Constitution shal1 adopt a law determining a firm cut-offdate, which shal1 be a date after 8 October 1990 and before 6 December 1993, and providing for the mechanisms, criteria and procedures,including tribunals, if any, through which such amnesty shal1 be dealtwith at any time after the law has been passed. With this Constitutionand these commitments we, the people of South Africa, open a newchapter in the history of our country.60

Interestingly, the passage starts out with the ambiguous metaphor of a 'historic bridge.' As Frank Ankersmit remarks, the problematic metaphor ofa bridge at the same time refers to a notion of closeness and a notion ofdistance, a gap or a divide.61 Things do not become much clearer whenthe text goes on by referring to itself as constituting a 'secure foundation[... ] to transcend [... ] a legacy of hatred, fear, guilt and revenge.' In themiddle of one of the most violent periods of South African history-morepeople are claimed to have died in the struggle over Apartheid between1990 and 1994 than in the thirty years before62-it is, of course, hard tobe unambiguous when speaking about the 'division and strife of the past.'From the perspective of the irreversible time of history, the reference tothe 'firm cut-off date' is essential, but its imprecise demarcation does notclear things Up.63 The matter is important because the very idea of amnesty,the raison d'etre of the postscript, is conditional on the 'pastness' of thedescribed events-very few would agree on granting amnesty for crimesthat are stil1 taking place. Then again, it was exactly this amnesty that wasneeded to make the division and strife 'of the past.' In one of the final linesof the interim constitution-only to be fol1owed by the lyrics of the newnational hymn-the matter is finally put straight, but it takes something ofa magic formula to do so. In a highly performative wording that speaks ofthe 'People of South Africa' in the first person plural, a new chapter in the


history of South Africa is opened and all that came before is stamped past.Amnesties can now be granted and the South Africans can start forgiving.

More than merely involving the problem of amnesty, the idea of a historical break between past and present is essential to the national identity ofthe 'new' South Africa. South African identity, as Richard Wilson remarks,is constructed on a 'discontinuous historicity.' 'Unlike some nationalistvision of the past in, say, Britain or France,' he writes, 'the new SouthAfrican nation is not naturalized by reference to its ancientness, but in itsaffirming of the uniqueness of the present.' Although most nations createtheir national identity by contrasting themselves to other nations, Wilsonargues, 'the most significant site of otherness for the new South Africa hasnot been other nations, it has been itself.'64 The 'new' South Africa is indeedquite unique when it opens the preamble to its 'final' constitution of 1996with a reference to its own violent past: 'We, the people of South Africa,Recognise the injustices of our past; Honour those who suffered for justiceand freedom in our land.... '65 Again, despite the expression of loyalty, itseems that the reference to the injustices of the past primarily states thatthese injustices are not present (the past as an absence or anti-presence),that they do not belong to the present of the new South Africa. From thisperspective, it is not insignificant to note that the TRC, during its work andwhen drawing its final report, was highly preoccupied with chronology andperiodization. As one commentator remarks, the TRC soon began with theconstruction of a new 'national time-line':

The use of calendar time and spatial coordinates as 'global' signs waswith the Commission from the very beginning. [ ... ] For the first time,incidents such as the Sharpeville massacre, the Soweto uprising, theChurch Street bomb, the Trojan Horse incident, the Bisho killings, theSt lames' Church massacre and so on, were given formal acknowledgement, placed alongside each other and organised chronologically sothat they covered the period of the Commission's mandate and the territory of the South African nation-state. 66

The construction this new national time-line evidently is of great value. However, the TRC's final report never really seems to transcend the level of chronology, which of course is a rather poor organizing principle. A large partof the first volume of the report is dedicated to a chronology of Apartheidlegislation in which a long series of Acts is listed with reference to the date ofcommencement and the date on which they were repealed, seemingly reassuring that Apartheid is really past and gone. 67 The findings on the regional profiles of the human rights violations described in the extensive third volume ofthe report are each organized following a strict chronology that is broken upin sequences dated 1960-1975, 1976-1982, 1983-1989, and 1990-1994.68

In the second volume that offers a national overview of the violations by theApartheid state inside and outside South Africa, by the liberation movements

'We the Victims and Survivors Declare tne rast to ne In lne rre~ert£ J/

and in the homelands, the narrated histories are strictly limited to the cutoff dates of 1960 to 1990.69 Some of the historians working for the TRCspoke about 'a certain obsession from the top with chronologies,' and theycomplained about the laborious assembling of lists that, according to them,contributed little to developing any insights.70 Another commentator statesthat the TRC opted for the wrong periodization so that it failed to see thecontinuities between the state violence and counterinsurgency strategies ofthe 1980s and the 1990s.71 The relationship to history established in the finalreport is best described by Desmond Tutu himself when in a foreword hequotes the well-known expression that 'the past is another country.m Thestrict periodization indeed enabled the TRC to create a highly dichotomousnarrative in which past and present are strictly separated and opposed inmoral terms, without scrutinizing the relations or continuities between thetwo. A prominent South African historian criticizes the time-frame used bythe TRC for still another reason. By narrowly defining the period of historywith which one has to come to terms, he argues, the TRC frees itself of theobligation to reckon with other parts of the past. 'What the TRC threatensto do,' he writes, 'is to uncouple these histories: to define three decades ofthe past in terms of perpetrators and victims and tightly defined categories ofwrong, and to suggest that this is "the beast of the past." '73

This mechanism is not restricted exclusively to the TRC's narrative butseems to have become a widespread way of dealing with the Apartheid past inSouth Africa. Chana Teeger and Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi argue that the SouthAfrican Apartheid Museum-the first museum in South Africa dedicatedentirely to telling the story of Apartheid-tries to create a consensual commemoration by consistently divorcing the (dreadful) past from the (hopeful)present and by resisting narrative lines that highlight the relevance of the pastto present issues and debates.74 Similarly, Heidi Grunebaum-Ralph complainsthat history in South Africa becomes represented as 'discontinuous with thepresent time,' and that it often is told in terms of 'before' and 'after,' whichmasks the entrenched structural and systemic continuities of Apartheid.75

A strict separation of past and present can indeed 'easily be used to get ridof the legacy of the past and to dodge historical responsibility. This is, forexample, illustrated in a statement submitted to the TRC by F. W. de Klerk inname of the National Party. De Klerk proposes a four-phase periodization ofApartheid rule and exonerates his party from historical debt by stressing thata distinction should be made between the 'old' and the 'new' National Party:

There is a profound difference between the National Party as it is presently constituted and the party that ruled South Africa for the firstdecades after its election victory in 1948. The policies and philosophyof the National Party as it is today are diametrically different fromthose of the old party. It also has a different support base. More thanhalf of the people who voted for the National Party in the last election


were black, coloured or Indian South Africans. Neither they, nor ouryounger white supporters, can or should be associated in any way withthe apartheid policies of the past.76

Moreover, as I mentioned in the introduction, while drawing on a historical discourse might aid truth commissions in reaching the closure they seek,help them (re)enforce modernist time consciousness, and sustain the project of simultaneity, it can also produce 'allochronistic' effects; for example,symbolically allocating into another time those who refuse to participate inthe process of reconciliation or nation building. Because forgiveness and reconciliation are considered defining features of the present, those unwillingto forgive or reconcile cannot be considered as fully simultaneous or contemporaneous with the rest of the nation-as fully belonging to the 'new'South Africa. Relying on the allochronistic potential of historical discourse,the TRC tends to stamp both non-cooperative perpetrators and rancorousvictims as living anachronisms, locked into the past and impeding the futureprogress of the nation. This mechanism is at work, for example, in DesmondTutu's famous expression that there is 'no future without forgiveness.' Theformula is powerful because it implicitly accuses those unwilling to forgiveof obstructing not just one specific future, but the future in general-as ifthey were threatening to bring time itself to a standstill. Kader Asmal, too,hoped that those whom he saw living in a neurotic world of oblivion, forgetting both time and place, would be forced into the contemporaneous presentby the truth commission and by the 'proper historical consciousness' if promoted. After the dam-burst of the TRC, he argues, only 'ahistoric hermits'could still deny the new reality, 'looking backwards at ghosts, unaware ofthe exorcism so decisively under way.m An example of a remarkably rhetorical allochronism is found in the following words of Asmal:

Exactly where (and when) are those few people living who still carrythe old South African flag to sporting events in the new South Africa?Where (and when) are those pilots of our national airline living, stilloblivious that the old H F Verwoerd dam in the middle of the country,a landmark they are fond of pointing out to passengers, is now calledthe Garieb in honour of the area's inhabitants. Where (and when) arethose people living who proclaim grandly their property rights overland and water taken from blacks at fire-sale prices after violent forcedremovals? What time are some of us living?78

RESISTING IRREVERSIBLE HISTORICAL TIME:THE KHULUMANI SUPPORT GROUP

Despite the fact that the South African constitution recognizes the injustices of the past and honors those who suffered for justice and freedom,


the issue of (individual) reparations seemed to be of no real concern for thedemocratic government in the years following the end of Apartheid. Thecontinuing requests for help and recognition by victims and survivors ofApartheid violence were almost completely disregarded by the ANC leadership, which did not (or no longer) consider the gloomy legacy of historicalinjustice as a priority.79 The recommendations for reparation made by theTRC were largely ignored. The government repeatedly showed contemptfor the request of individual monetary redress, indicating that it preferredcollective reparations. 80 It was only after considerable pressure from insideand outside of South Africa that President Mbeki, in 2003, announced thatthere would be a 'once-off' grant of R30,000 for individuals who werelisted as victims by the TRC. Only a small number of victims were recognized by the TRC, however, and even they were disappointed by the sum ofmoney, which was much less than the one promised before. 81 So althoughthe new democratic government as a successor regime has formally recognized its responsibilities in the righting of old wrongs, most of the victimshave never received any monetary or material compensation.

Even more distressing than the reparations issue is the state of the prosecutions in South Africa today. The idea underlying the TRC's arrangementof selective amnesties in exchange for truth was that all those who did no~

come forward to the commission would later be prosecuted individually.To this end, a special unit was established in the 'National Directorate ofPublic Prosecutions' shortly after the handover of the TRC's 1998 report. 82Almost no prosecutions were started, however, and the few court caseson high-level perpetrators of Apartheid atrocities have had a sad historyof failure. Although the ANC-Ied government officially stayed loyal to itsoriginal rejection of a general 'blanket' amnesty, several new rounds ofpartial amnesties have been organized since the end of the activities of theTRC.83 Also it can be asked whether the almost complete absence of prosecutions does not in effect come down to a situation of de facto impunityand blanket amnesty. In addition to these problems of amnesty and reparations, many victims and survivors stress that the TRC has not revealed thefull truth, and they have, for example, begun to ask for more attention forthe numerous people who disappeared during Apartheid.

Victims and survivors criticize the government's lack of engagement towardwhat they call the 'unfinished business' of the TRC. One of the most important voices of protest comes from the Khulumani Support Group, the onlypost-Apartheid social movement in South Africa to represent victims andsurvivors of Apartheid violence on a nationallevel.84 Khulumani-isiZulufor 'Speaking out'-was originally created in 1995 to facilitate the participation of victims and survivors to the TRC process and, just like the truthcommission, was based on the idea that speaking about the past wouldhelp to heal traumas.8S The support group helped to inform people aboutthe TRC and organized statement takings in local communities; later in the


TRC process, it became instrumental in debriefing and supporting victimsbefore and after they testified; and overall it played an important role inlegitimizing the commission.86 In the first years of its organizational life,Khulumani formed part of the 'Trauma Centre for Survivors of Violenceand Torture' in Cape Town, but in September 2000 it struck out on itsown after some tensions with the staff of professional therapists. 87 As anautonomous organization, Khulumani started to radicalize its criticism ofthe government, and the group developed new perspectives on the politicsof memory. The organization also became increasingly disappointed aboutthe TRC and its outcomes. The therapeutic accent of the early period wasgradually replaced by a more political approach, and the issue of victim andcommunity reparations has become more prominent. 88 Khulumani formallyapproves of the idea of national reconciliation but argues that this only canbe a long-term project and that it has no priority for its members. 89 Thegroup maintains that the question of reconciliation is premature and statesthat asking victims to heal and to reconcile is 'asking too much, too early.''Healing' remains one of Khulumani's stated objectives, but the organization has become increasingly critical of the fact that the victims and survivors are asked to heal their traumas in function of nation building.90

Interestingly, Khulumani's critique challenges the irreversible time of history and especially the stress on an absent or distant past, and this happensin a way that, despite some important differences-such as Khulumani'sembrace of material reparations and its formal approval of reconciliationin the long run-closely resembles the resistance of the Madres de Plaza deMayo. As Christopher Colvin explains, Khulumani members refuse 'closure' or 'recovery' until the government fulfills its promises. In contrast tothe 'therapeutic mode of historiography,' they focus on victims who are stillsuffering and have not yet recovered.

History-as-therapy assumes, as trauma therapy does, that the traumais over and that it is the task of the therapist, or historian, to convincethe patient or the nation that the trauma is over. For Khulumani, however, crafting the history of the struggle means writing a history abouta struggle that is not over. Time has passed but the suffering and thestruggle continues. [... ] For these victims, the idea that the past was aperiod of oppression and the present is a new and redeemed moment offreedom is an illusion, a premature verdict on a not yet finished phaseof history's unfolding.91

Khulumani indeed questions the absolute break between past and presentthat is so basic in the political constellation of the 'new' South Africa. Asthey express their critique, 'While government has stated publicly that thepast has been buried, the country and its citizens continue to live with theconsequences of apartheid.'92 The organization acknowledges and praisesthe fact that South Africa has become a democratic country but argues that


the fate of victims and survivors and the never-implemented recommendations of the TRC constitute a debt for the nation.93 In order to remind thegovernment of this fact, Khulumani started to organize highly visible protest actions. In its communications on these actions, Khulumani has developed a discourse that stresses the fact that Apartheid's historical injusticesare not yet past, argues that the mere passage of time will not solve matters,and denies the notion of a distance between present and past. By failing toembrace the full scope of reparations, Khulumani argues, the South African government promotes 'a model of transitional justice that incorporates"unfinished business."'94 The support group warns 'that it is folly to thinkthat the demand for accountability will fade with time. The demands ofvictims have to be addressed. The past does not bury the past.'95 On theoccasion of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in 2005,Khulumani posed the question of how Apartheid would be remembered 60years after its downfall:

we are still trying to locate the remains of some of our children, abducted and burnt to death [... ]; we are still trying to rebuild our livesout of the apartheid-ravaged and poverty-stricken homelands [... ] weare still wondering how our pain, suffering and loss was given a symbolic monetary value of a once-off R30,000 reparations payment [... ]we are still [... ] It is time to answer these questions and to act on them,so that in 2054, our children, their children, and their children's children will not only remember our suffering and say 'never again' but willno longer themselves be dealing with the consequences of apartheid.96

The idea that a preoccupation with the past does not oppose a future orientation but that instead it is needed for the future generations is a recurringleitmotiv. Hinting at a popular expression in the 'new South Africa' thatrefers to the young generations as the ones that are born free, Khulumanistates that the government has betrayed its 'Born Frees.' Although the government gave amnesties to perpetrators, the Khulumani members assurethat 'there is no "amnesty" from the potential effect of unresolved familytrauma on our members' babies and children.' Therefore, Khulumani callson all South Africans to 'accept that the past is not yet past.'97 The organization bitterly criticizes the often-heard cry to 'move on from our apartheidhistory' because without redress this further diminishes the role that victims and survivors played in helping bring democracy.98 'South Africa cannot pretend,' they argue, 'that the "past is past," that business can carry onwith "business as usual" [... ]'99 Commenting on its legal struggle againstcorporate complicity with Apartheid, Khulumani articulates its most radical critique on irreversible historical time. In a passage that strangely mirrors the performative language of the postscript to the 1993 constitutionthat once enabled the amnesty arrangement by declaring the chapter of thepast to be closed, the group states that:

History, Memory, and State-Sponsored Violence

Victims and survivors declare that that past is in the present and thatthe only means of preventing the recurrence of human rights violationsthrough the collusion of multinational corporations with illegitimatepolitical regimes, is through enforcing the constitutional right of citizens to seek legal redress in any competent court.100

Keeping the same tone and after repeating that the time has come to holdperpetrators to account, Khulumani gives a major blow to the politics oftime that underpin the therapeutic and reconciliatory discourse that hasbeen enforced on victims and survivors:

It is not perpetrators who should be announcing that it is time to moveon from the horrors of a past that continues to live in the present. Itis victims who should announce that time. (Legum) Victims and survivors should be supported by their government in such an importantendeavour. 101

CONCLUSION

Although one should honor the many positive evolutions, the recent historyof South Africa painfully demonstrates how the dream of breaking withthe past and starting all over again is an ideal that is very hard to put intopractice. Whereas Apartheid formally came to an end on the day of theinauguration of the government led by Mandela, a more substantial breakwith the legacy of Apartheid was, and still is, a long-term project. In a context where people until recently denied each other's humanity due to Apartheid, shared no common history due to state censorship and manipulation,and even shared no common national territory due to the establishment offormally independent homelands, one of the few convincing arguments forthe necessity of national reconciliation had to be situated in the idea thatboth friend and foe are contemporaries-that willingly or unwillingly theyhave to share same present. Regrettably, it is exactly this idea of contemporaneity or simultaneity that often is threatened in places where memoryof offense for big parts of the population tends to create an irrevocableexperience of time.

It is in this context of the need for a project of national simultaneity thatI propose to situate the TRC's 'historical' turn. However, although I thinkthat the importance of the performative potential of historical discourse isall too often neglected, my focus on performativity is not meant to downplay the importance of historical truth or the need for official acknowledgment. In addition, it is important to stress that although certain phrasesand wordings might suggest otherwise, I do not want to insinuate that thestaff of the TRC consciously turned to a historical discourse for its performative potential or knowingly engaged in a politics of time in order to


restore the modern sense of a break between past and present and declareuncooperative victims to be out of time. Although I think that discursiveperformativity and politics of time can have real consequences that can beboth desirable and undesirable, this performativity is more about effectsthan it is about intentions.

I hope to have demonstrated that it is precisely as a reaction to this performative use of historical discourse that the discourse of the KhulumaniSupport Group has to be understood. Several of the slogans and expressions used by Khulumani show that they have a clear understanding of thepolitics of time. Although they never use this exact terminology, it seemsthat they comprehend very well how the stress on irreversible historicaltime-on the temporal distance or on the absence of the past-tends toproduce the political effect of letting bygones be bygones and of (indirectly)facilitating the reign of impunity. Khulumani's political strategy is based ona notion of irrevocable time. Although the group until now did not developa straightforwardly spectral language such as the one used by the Madresde Plaza de Mayo, the group is still relatively young and its discourse couldwell evolve in that direction.

4 'The Past Must Remain the Past'Time of History and Time of Justicein the 'New Sierra Leone'

The armed conflict between the Government of Sierra Leone and theRUF/SL is hereby ended with immediate effect. Accordingly, the two foeswill ensure that a total cessation of hostilities is observed forthwith.

Abidjan Peace Agreement, 1996'

The armed conflict between the Government of Sierra Leone and theRUF/SL is hereby ended with immediate effect. Accordingly, the twosides shall ensure that a total and permanent cessation of hostilitiesis observed forthwith.

Lome Peace Agreement, 19992

INTRODUCTION

Sierra Leone takes a relatively unique place in the transitional justice universe because in addressing its eleven years of civil war, it developed a 'twotrack' approach in which a truth commission and a war tribunal operatedalongside each other. The Sierra Leonean Truth and Reconciliation Commission (SLTRC) was active between 2002 and 2004, but the initiative for thecommission was already taken during the Lome peace negotiations in 1999,where it originally had to function as a counterweight to a controversialblanket amnesty. It was only later, after one of the parties in the conflict violated the peace treaty in 2000, that the blanket amnesty was partly revisedand that, with the help of the United Nations, a Special Court for SierraLeone was established that, just like the SLTRC, would start to operate in2002. Up to 2010, the tribunal only indicted thirteen perpetrators who bore'the greatest responsibility.' It seems improbable that more than ten of themwill ever stand trial before the operations of the court will be suspended, soit is likely that the great majority of perpetrators will never face any criminaljustice. Nevertheless, the mere existence of the Special Court has rendered itmore difficult for the SLTRC to convincingly claim that truth telling constitutes a full-fledged form of justice. As a result, the idea of restorative justice,although certainly present, has been less prominent than it has been in theSouth African TRC. Except for this somewhat less pronounced justice claim

'The Past Must Remain the Past' 67

and the fact that amnesty was not made conditional on truth revelation, theSLTRC was strongly inspired by the South African example. With a possibly even greater conviction than that of their South African colleagues, themembers of the Sierra Leonean commission posited the therapeutic and reconciliatory effects of historical truth telling. Like the South African TRC, theSLTRC was presided over by a religious leader (the Methodist bishop ]osephHumper) and was permeated by a religiously inspired language that spokeabout the need for forgiveness, catharsis, and healing.

Closely resembling the South African case, the link between historicaltruth and nation building-which is understood to be self-evident but isnever really explained by the truth commission and its supporters-is infact ambiguous and quite problematic. Despite its stress on the importanceof creating an 'impartial historical record' and its often repeated slogan thaturges people to 'forgive but not forget,' the SLTRC manifests many aspectsthat are commonly associated more with forgetting than with remembering. Moreover, Tim Kelsall has argued that the commissioners' attempts toelicit the truth from the perpetrators largely failed. 3 In the face of this relative ineffectiveness in revealing historical facts (at least in the public hearings), Kelsall argues that the importance of the commission in relation to itsaim of creating reconciliation should be situated not in its truth productionbut in its ceremonial or ritual dimensions.

In an attempt to explain the often puzzling turn to history in the SierraLeonean context of transitional justice, I will elaborate on the thesis that Iformulated in the foregoing chapter. The use of a historical discourse in theSLTRC again primarily must be related to an attempt to distance the painful past and, in that way, to restore or impose a modernist break betweenpast and present. The Sierra Leonean e1ites, as we will see, manifest a highlypronounced 'will to modernity'; they loudly proclaim their pursuit of progress and their ambition to 'move the country forwards,' away from the'darkened' past. Stressing the ritual dimension in the work of the SLTRC,following the claims of Tim Kelsall, I will argue that the performative useof historical discourse can be analyzed as a kind of 'exorcism' of the haunting past. Much like in the two foregoing cases, there has been considerable(local) resistance to the activities of the truth commission in Sierra Leone.Despite the great differences in the motivation of the resistance in SierraLeone and that in Argentina and South Africa, I will once more try to showthat this resistance can be related to a different consciousness of time thatcan be interpreted as irrevocable, rather than irreversible.

FROM CONFLICT TO FRAGILE PEACE: SITUATINGTHE TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION COMMISSION

The start of the 'long decade' of bloody conflict in Sierra Leone is commonly dated to 23 March 1991.4 Decades of bad governance, corruption,


and a seemingly contradictory combination of the state's total presence andits concurrent total erosion created a situation in which Sierra Leone wasextremely vulnerable to attacks from both inside and outside the country. 5

In March 1991, a group of armed rebels calling itself the RevolutionaryUnited Front (RUF) entered the country along the Sierra Leone-Liberianborder. Their stated aim was to overthrow the authoritarian governmentof President Joseph Momoh and his All Peoples Congress (APC) that hadruled uninterrupted since the late 1960s. Although the invaders probablynumbered no more than a hundred, they successfully challenged the disorganized Sierra Leone Army (SLA). In just a few months, the rebels tookcontrol of about one fifth of the country's territory. Initially, the rebelsreceived some popular support, but that soon changed when they startedbehaving brutally, abused local women, and carried out indiscriminateviolence against civilians. Still, the thin veil of idealist ideology that therebels deployed to legitimize their invasion and the idea of joining a bandof 'freedom fighters' attracted some youths. Other youngsters were forciblyconscripted into the RUF. The rebels were not the only ones to use childsoldiers, however, and youth conscription together with the widespread useof terror techniques, including mutilations and amputations, became one ofthe most notorious aspects of the conflict in Sierra Leone.

After a year of fighting, the APC government faced a fatal challenge thatcame not from the rebels but from its own army. On 29 April 1992, a smallgroup of young soldiers led by officers Valentine Strasser and Julius MaadaBio started to mutiny. Terrified by the soldiers approaching the presidentialpalace, President Momoh fled (allegedly disguised as a woman), on whichthe mutineers, mostly against their own expectations, found themselves incharge of the country. The mutineering officers created a National Provisional Ruling Council (NPRC) chaired by Valentine Strasser, who promisedthat he would soon end the war and return the country to constitutionalrule. Initially Strasser enjoyed great domestic popularity, and his enlightened rhetoric temporarily even assured him support from the internationalcommunity. Moreover, his NPRC was quite fortunate on the battlefield,where it partly succeeded in pushing back the RUF. For a while it seemedthat the army would be able to defeat the rebels, but that hope turned out tobe in vain. Adapting itself to the military defeats in the open field, the RUFretreated into the bush, where it initiated a hit-and-run style of warfare. Farfrom bringing the country closer to peace, this transformation of the RUFby late 1993 heralded the beginning of a second, even more brutal phase ofguerilla warfare that spread the conflict all over the country. 6

In the ongoing struggle, the undisciplined government forces also startedto commit atrocities, whose main victims were, once again, civilians. Thetragic position of the civilian population, simultaneously harassed by therebels and the army, led to the creation of civil defense groups that addeda new dimension of complexity to the conflict.7 At first the civil defensegroups only protected their own communities. Later they developed into


the well-armed and organized Civil Defense Force that became a de factoarm of the state and that in its turn became implicated in grave humanrights abuses, which sometimes were ethnically inspired. 8 In addition tomobilizing civil militias, the government also tried to make up for thenearly collapsing national army by deploying mercenaries.

All of the foregoing constituted a complex and extremely brutal conflictthat seemed endlessly prolonged by the incomes that the different partiesextracted from the (illegal) sale of diamonds. Some of the first rays of hopefor the population came in 1996 when Valentine Strasser, pressured by civilsociety groups in Freetown, kept his promise to organize democratic elections. The elections took place in two rounds between February and March1996 and (after a probably fraudulent result) delivered Ahmad Tejan Kabbah of the Sierra Leone People's Party as the new president. Around thesame period, another ray of hope was provided when the military stalematedrove government and rebels to the negotiating table. On 30 November1996, in the Ivory Coast capital of Abidjan, both parties signed a peaceagreement that arranged for a blanket amnesty and promised an immediateend to the conflict. Tragically, the population's euphoria about the newlygained peace would be of short duration. Soon tensions ran high again, andthe real intentions of the RUF became clear when its leader, Foday Sankoh,was arrested 2 March 1997 on his way to meet an arms dealer in Nigeria.Also in 1997, Sierra Leone was the stage for a new military coup, in whichmutineers forced the government to flee and installed the Armed ForcesRevolutionary Council (AFRC). The coup would prove to be relativelyshort-lived but would be one of the most violent phases of the civil war. TheAFRC invited the RUF to share power, and together they created a situationof lawlessness, structural breakdown, and total terror. It was only with thehelp of the mainly Nigerian-staffed Cease Fire Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) that Freetown could be liberated and the government of PresidentKabbah reinstalled. 9 Although the military stalemate continued and largeparts of the country remained in the hands of the RUF-AFRC coalition,Kabbah almost immediately initiated a trial for treason against the leadersof the coup, including Sankoh, who was subsequently condemned to death.Partly in reaction to the prosecution of their leader, the RUF plunged thecountry into a new campaign of terror that it aptly named 'operation noliving thing.' In January 1999, terror came to an apotheosis when RUFAFRC forces managed to enter and pillage Freetown once more. It took asiege of more than six weeks before ECOMOG forces (who, like all partiesto the conflict, themselves started to commit atrocities) were able to recapture the destroyed town. Despite the retreat of the RUF-AFRC coalitionfrom the capital, the military stalemate remained unbroken.

It was in this context that President Kabbah, pressured by the UN andthe ECOMOG, asked the still-imprisoned RUF leader, Sankoh, to take partin new peace talks hosted by the government of Togo in its capital Lome.Prior to the negotiations, a conference was organized in which the political


elite consulted traditional leaders and civil society groups to discuss thematter of transitional justice. It soon became clear that Sierra Leone, asPriscilla Hayner puts it, 'presented "a worst-case" context for trying topreserve international standards of justice while negotiating peace:IO As aconsequence, most were convinced that peace could only be obtained if thenegotiators agreed with the RUF's demand for a blanket amnesty.11 Consequently, the idea of prosecuting perpetrators or creating a war tribunalwas never really considered by any of the negotiating parties. 12 The humanrights community nevertheless formulated three basic demands that had tobe met by the negotiations: first, it asked for the active involvement of civilsociety in the peace process; second, it demanded that the peace agreementcontain clear provisions for the protection and promotion of human rights;and third, it rejected any agreement that would grant power sharing to therebels prior to general elections. 13 Further, it asked for the establishmentof a Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation Commission and lobbied for theadaptation of the amnesty arrangement so as to make it conditional on collaboration with the truth commission.14

When the Lome Peace Accord was eventually signed on 7 July 1999,only some of the demands of the human rights community were met. Therebels had clearly not been bothered very much by the idea of a truth commission, so this request made it into the final accord.J5 To the dismay of thehuman rights activists, however, the word justice was left out of the nameof the commission, the peace agreement did provide for power sharing inthe period before the scheduled general elections, and, in addition to that,the amnesty arrangement was not made conditional on truth telling.16

Although the population of Sierra Leone was mostly dismayed about theidea of power sharing, it was the blanket amnesty that gave the Lome PeaceAccord a bad reputation internationally. Only shortly before the signing ofthe Lome Accord, the UN spoke out against blanket amnesties, and thispolicy gave the UN representative Francis Okelo great difficulty. At the lastmoment, during the actual signing ceremony, Okelo, without informingany of the other parties, decided to add the following note to the copy ofthe agreement that was signed by the UN:

The United Nations holds the understanding that the amnesty and pardon in Article IX of the agreement shall not apply to international crimesand other serious violations of international humanitarian lawP

Shortly after the signing of the Lome Peace Accord, the UN set up a peacemission in Sierra Leone and started with a disarmament and demobilization program.IS Yet, nothing was done with Okelo's annex to the peaceagreement. The first steps in the direction of the creation of a Special Courtwere only taken after the rebels in May 2000 violated the conditions of thepeace accord by resuming hostilities. 19 Arguing that the breeching of theagreements annulled the amnesty provisions, President Kabbah addressed


the UN with a formal request for the establishment of a tribunal. When theUN agreed, the legal foundation for the Special Court was created.

Although the Lome agreement foresaw the creation of the Truth andReconciliation Commission within a period of ninety days after its signing,the resurgence of hostilities considerably delayed the establishment of thecommission. The practical legal design for the commission was elaboratedin the form of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Act approved byparliament in November 2000. Shortly after the passing of the Act, a seriesof projects was set up in preparation for the commission. However, thetruth commission actually started operating only late in 2002, around thesame period as the Special Court. 20 Much like the Special Court, the SLTRCwas a hybrid institution, partly national and partly international. The UNplayed a major role in the establishment of the commission, and its hybridcharacter was reflected in the composition of the team of commissionersthat included four Sierra Leoneans appointed by the president and threeinternational members selected by the United Nations High Commissionerfor Human Rights. 21 The commission subdivided its work into three subsequent phases that focused on one principal task. During the first phase,taking about four months, a team of statement-takers gathered more than8,000 testimonies from victims, witnesses, and perpetrators. As a kind ofpreview, in January 2003, the commission released a preliminary analysisof the first 1,300 testimonies that already identified 3,000 victimsY Thesecond phase of the (public and closed) hearings began in April 2003 andended in early August of that same year. Although the commission wasunable to extend its activities to all regions of the country due to political instability, several hearings were held in Freetown and in most of thedistricts of Sierra Leone. 23 After the final hearings, the commission movedinto a report-writing phase that, like the other phases, was scheduled totake about four months but lasted for more than a year. On 5 October2004, the commission finally presented its report to the president, but ittook until well into 2005 before the report found its way to the nationaland international public. 24

THE SPECIAL COURT AND THE TRC:'TIME OF JURISDICTION' VS. 'TIME OF HISTORY'

Like most truth commissions, the truth commission of Sierra Leone wasoriginally set up to function as an alternative instead of a complement tocriminal justice. As its commissioners stress, the two institutions 'were notcreated as part of a grand design.'25 The possibility of setting up a wartribunal was, as we have seen, indeed, never seriously contemplated at thetime of the peace negotiations in Lome when the decision to establish acommission was taken. Sierra Leone was not the first country where a truthcommission worked parallel with criminal justice efforts, but the Sierra


Leonean case clearly illustrates the difficulties and potential pitfalls thatcan arise in such a situation. Despite considerable efforts-by the UnitedNations, leading legal experts, and NGOs-to think through the differentroles and intended synergistic relationships between the truth commissionand the Special Court, frictions inevitably arose. 26 During the preparationphase, the truth commission was confronted with a disapP?inti~g .fundraising, which it interpreted as indicating an indifference to Its mISSIOn ora greater 'donor enthusiasm' for the Special CourtY As ex-commissionerWilliam Schabas describes the sentiment that lived under the commissioners: 'Possibly donors saw the Commission as the compromised offspring ofthe Lome Agreement, with its distasteful amnesty, something with whichthe court was untainted.'2M Besides the tensions surrounding the issue ofgetting finances from the same pool of donors, the two inst~tutio~s alsocompeted for trained personnel, which was scarce after the bram dram thatplagued Sierra Leone for so long. 29

Most of all, however, the commissioners of the SLTRC feared that confusion about the autonomous functioning of the two institutions woulddeter perpetrators from witnessing to the commission. Therefore, the personnel of both institutions and national and international policy makersalike stressed repeatedly that the commission and the court had differentmandates. On the one hand, it was stated that the truth commission had nopunitive mission and that it only aimed at truth seeking, catharsis, and reconciliation; on the other hand, it was communicated that the Special Courtwould only prosecute those perpetrators who bore the greatest responsibility and that it would not focus on child soldiers. 30

In addition to this problem of popular perception, experts also foresawa wide range of real legal problems. Most of the experts' concern revolvedaround the problem of information sharing and the possibility that perpetrators' self-incriminating testimonies given before the truth commissioncould be used as evidence to convict them before the Special Court. Supporters of the SLTRC asked for legal protection against the use of this selfincriminating evidence so as to facilitate confessions by perpetrators. 31

Eventually the main conflict between the two institutions arose overanother, quite unexpected, issue, namely that of the right of detainees inthe custody of the Special Court to take part in the public hearings ofthe truth commission. The conflict started when three indicted prisonersincluding the leader of the Civil Defense Forces, Sam Hinga Normanrequested to testify in public. When the prosecutor of the Special Courtrejected the request, fearing that the accused would use the public forum to

propagate hate, the SLTRC started a legal struggle to reverse this decision.After passing through several legal instances, the issue ended up with thePresident of the Appeals Chamber, judge Geoffrey Robertson, who ruledthat the detainees could not testify in public but would be allowed to testifyby written statements. In a reasoning strongly contested by the commissioners of the truth commission, judge Robertson argued that the fragile


equilibrium in the country raised security concerns. Also, the judge fearedthat the SLTRC's public hearings, which were to be held in the building ofthe court, would resemble or even parody a real court case:

A man in custody awaiting trial on very serious charges is to be paraded, in the very court where that trial will shortly be held, beforea Bishop rather than a presiding judge [... ] The event will have theappearance of a trial, at least the appearance of a sort of trial familiarwith centuries pastY

Furthermore, he argued that the commISSIOn was only denied a publichearing, 'an event more conducive to its reconciliation work (which cannotapply to indictees who plead not guilty) than its business of constructing anhistorical record.'33 Moreover, the judge declared that the Special Court hadprimacy over the truth commission and that it was better suited to achievereconciliation because only the court had the power to deliver justice:

Within the fallible parameters of human justice, with its fundamentalsof due process, transparency and defence rights, we are charged to doour best to end the impunity that powerful perpetrators would otherwise enjoy. This much is owed to the memory of murdered victims,to maimed survivors and to those who grieve for them. It is a duty weshare with another body, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission setup by the Sierra Leone government. We shall work together to uncoverthe truth, although the Court alone has the power to deliver the justicethat is a prerequisite for reconciliation. 34

Agitated by this verdict, the commissioners dedicate the bulk of a chapterin the SLTRC's final report to a critical review of the judge's reasoning,which they consider to be 'rigid' and 'out of step with current notions oftransitional justice.'35 They complain that judge Robertson caricaturizedthe functioning of the commission and argue that he saw reconciliationas merely consisting of acts of confession and forgiveness while moreoverrigidly opposing the commission's reconciliation and truth telling exercises.Robertson's decision, according to the commissioners, rested on little morethan a 'misconstrued territorial concern.'36

The commissioners' feeling that the 'restorative justice' and even the 'truthtelling' they advocated were not always taken seriously by legalists and policy makers seems justified. President Kabbah, for example, in an address atthe start of the public hearings of the SLTRC in Freetown in April 2003,seemed to prefer talking about and promoting the Special Court, and hedeclared that more than revealing truth, the most important purpose of thetruth commission was its therapeutic function that had to lead to nationalreconciliationY However, in the context of this book, it is important to


point out that the frictions between the SLTRC and the Special Court ona more basic level seem to originate in a conflict between what I describedin the introduction as the 'time of history' and the 'time of jurisdiction.' Tounderstand the different or even contrary considerations and intentions thatinspired policy makers when they set up the truth commission on the onehand and the Special Court on the other, we can take a look at the respectivelegal texts that founded them. The 'Truth and Reconciliation CommissionAct,' which in 2000 established the SLTRC, stipulates that its function:

is to create an impartial historical record of violation and abuses ofhuman rights and international humanitarian law related to the armedconflict in Sierra Leone, from the beginning of the Conflict in 1991to the signing of the Lome Peace Agreement; to address impunity, torespond to the needs of the victims, to promote healing and reconciliation and to prevent a repetition of the violations and abuses suffered. 38

To fulfill this task, the commission is granted a mandate of one year witha possible extension of a further six months. In addition, the Act requiresthat the members of the commission be persons of 'integrity and credibility' and persons with high professional standing or competence, explicitlynaming lawyers, social scientists, religious leaders, and psychologists.

Despite the remarkable absence of any reference to historians, the textrepeats several times that the commissioners have to create an 'impartialhistorical record' and need to look into 'past violations or abuses.' In anattachment to the Act, titled 'Memorandum of Objects and Reasons,' theaim of the commission is once more formulated as:

a catharsis for constructive interchange between the victims and perpetrators of human rights violations and abuses and from this catharsisthe Commission is to compile 'a clear picture of the past.' Accordingly,by clause 6, the principal function of the Commission is to create animpartial historical record of events in question as the basis for the taskof preventing their recurrence. 39

The true relevance of the language of the SLTRC Act, with its repeatedreferences to 'historical records,' 'past violations and abuses,' and 'picturesof the past,' only becomes clear when it is contrasted to the wording of thelegal text that enacted the Special Court. This founding statute declaresthat the Special Court, except for persons under the age of fifteen, shall'have the power to prosecute persons who bear the greatest responsibilityfor serious violation of international humanitarian law and Sierra Leoneanlaw.'40 Furthermore, the document voids the amnesty granted by the LomePeace Agreement for all persons under the jurisdiction of the Special Court.For pragmatic reasons, so as not to overburden it, the temporal jurisdictionof the Special Court is restricted to the period starting at the symbolic date


of 30 November 1996, when the Abidjan Peace Accord was signed (thegovernment of Sierra Leone later unsuccessfully requested that the startingdate be moved to the beginning of the conflict in 199141 ). In contrast tothe truth commission, whose investigative mandate was restricted to theevents between 1991 and 1999, the temporal jurisdiction of the SpecialCourt has no finishing date. Despite the fact that both institutions wereexpected to focus on periods that are overlapping, the wording of the legaltext that founded the Special Court makes not a single reference to termslike 'history,' 'historical,' or 'past' when discussing the gross human rightsviolations committed during the civil war. Clearly what the perpetratorswith the 'greatest responsibility' did cannot be considered past, even if theiratrocities were committed on the same chronological date as the 'past violations or abuses' committed by smaller fry that are to be passed on to the'impartial historical record.' Despite all rhetoric about the 'addressing ofimpunity,' most policy makers and legalists primarily seem to have considered the truth commission, in its close relation to the amnesty arrangement,primarily as a way to impose the irreversible time of history on events thatotherwise would tend to stay very much 'alive' and 'in the present.'

This unspoken interpretation of the function of the SLTRC by policymakers and legalists has not remained uncontested. The claims of the commissioners of the SLTRC about their alleged capacity to deliver (restorative)justice as a worthy alternative to 'hard' retributive justice are a clear manifestation of a reluctance to let the scope of the commission be reduced to thatof the irreversible time of history. Similarly, the commissioners on severaloccasions express their dissatisfaction with the strict temporal limitations oftheir official mandate. Discussing and interpreting the imposed time-frame,the commissioners in their final report and in private reflections argue thatthe strict regulation only applies to a part of the commission's functions:

In other words, although the 'historical record' of the Commission istime-limited, there is nothing in section 6(1) [of the founding 'Truthand Reconciliation Commission Act'] to prevent the Commission fromlooking back prior to 1991 and forward beyond the Lome Agreementin terms of the responsibility to address impunity, to respond to theneeds of the victims, to promote healing and reconciliation and to prevent a repetition of the violations and abuses sufferedY

'In this sense,' the argument continues, 'the Commission does not have anytemporal jurisdiction, in contrast, for example, with the Special Court forSierra Leone.'43 And a little further: 'For all of these reasons, the Commission has not felt itself to be particularly constrained by the time frame setout in section 6(1).'44 It is repeatedly stressed that the commission's gaze isnot only directed backward to the past but that it also looks forward to thefuture. The final report of the SLTRC, in comparison to the one of the TRCin South Africa, indeed is constructed less around the notion of an absolute


break between past and present that would implicitly legitimize the postconflict state. In the 'findings' section of the final report, the commissioners formulated the depressing conclusion that many of the root causes thatprovoked the civil war remained unchanged in post-conflict Sierra Leone,and that the continuing presence of political prisoners in the 'new SierraLeone' de facto came down to the persistence of the past.45 Seriously overestimating the break between past and present in other post-conflict societies, ex-commissioner William Schabas in retrospect claims that one of theunique features of the SLTRC was that it 'paradoxically' had to constructits 'impartial historical record' at a moment when the transition was stillincomplete and the conflict thus not yet fully past:

The most celebrated truth commissions have operated not only whenthe conflict was over but when the transition, in a social sense, waswell underway. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission did not need to recommend that the causes of its country's ownsuffering, apartheid and racial discrimination, be prohibited. Similarly,Chile's truth commission did not have to argue that democracy was abetter alternative to dictatorship. Sierra Leone is different. The end ofthe conflict was little more than a ceasefire, not a decisive victory byone side over the other, and above all no triumph of a progressive socialvision over the perverse values and practices of the past.46

The paradox that puzzles William Schabas should of course not puzzle us.From the perspective that we are developing in this book, the sobering insightthat 'peacetime' might not easily be distinguished from 'conflicttime'-thatthe past persists-offers an explanation for the introduction of historicaldiscourse rather than contradicting it. Moreover, although the commissioners' strategic resistance against the imposed temporal frame seems to implyan insight in the working of the irreversible time of history and the way thelatter tends to reinforce an attitude that lets 'bygones be bygones,' the commissioners at many other occasions stress and ptomote this very same notionof time, speaking in terms of a 'progressive triumph' and an absolute breakwith the past. It is to this issue that I will turn in the next paragraph.

A LONGING FOR PROGRESS ANDA WILL TO MODERNITY

The sociologist John Torpey claims that the recent worldwide 'fever' forreparations and apologies has largely supplanted the elaboration of visionsof the future in contemporary politics. The preoccupation with 'comingto terms with the past,' he complains, is so pervasive that the rallyingcry 'don't mourn, organize' by the traditional labor movement has beenreplaced by an 'organize to mourn.'47 Although this thesis might be true

'The Past Must Kemam ttJe raST 11

for specific branches of the broader politics of reparation, it does not holdfor transitional justice in a country like Sierra Leone. The installation ofthe truth commission in that country, similar to what I already claimed forthe case of South Africa, should be interpreted not as the manifestation ofan obsession with the past or a loss of interest in the future but rather asa direct reaction to the failures of progress and the breakdown or absenceof a modern consciousness of time that is based on the belief in a cleardivide between past and present. Far from 'eclipsing the visionary modesof imagining the future; the TRC in Sierra Leone combined its backwardlooking gaze with a great longing for progress. This is particularly clear inthe voluntaristic project named 'National Vision for Sierra Leone' that wasorganized by the SLTRC. According to the commission, the future SierraLeone could only be built if a 'roadmap' was 'envisioned' by its population. Therefore, it launched a call for contributions, asking people to sendin essays, poems, slogans, songs, paintings, or photographs that expressedaspirations for the future Sierra Leone. The commission claims to havereceived more than 250 contributions coming from about 300 individuals who together represented a cross-section of the national population.48

'Through the National Vision; the commissioners argue, 'Sierra Leoneansof all ages and backgrounds can claim their own citizenship space in thenew Sierra Leone and make their contributions to the county's cultural andnational heritage.'49 Further, the commissioners write that, 'Although theTRC asked Sierra Leoneans to speak about the future, the majority of contributions addressed the future by making reference to the past,' and theyenthusiastically add that 'the contributions amply demonstrate that SierraLeone can and must reach for new heights.'50

Obviously the national vision project was meant to promote and legitimate the ethico-political agenda of the truth commission, and this agendais clearly reflected in the content of the selection of contributions that arereproduced in the final report. The first featured piece is a stamp thatdepicts the contours of the country, a crowd that marches united behind thenational flag, the logo of the SLTRC, and a little text that proclaims the following message: 'It's true the war is over-Welcome to new Sierra Leone.'Next is an extract from a poem by some ex-RUF prisoners: 'My SierraLeone, a new chapter and era,' it opens, and a little further it continues,'The past must remain the past/With the past we know the present/Andcombined we make the future/Now is the time to move forward.' The poemis followed by a reproduction of a painting that depicts a group of peoplelooking up toward the sun, which the commissioners themselves have provided with a little comment that says that they are looking to the future asa bright new day and that they are proud of being Sierra Leonean. Thereis even a contribution by Chairperson Bishop Joseph Humper himself: ashort essay that envisions a 'revived Sierra Leone, born out of the ashes'and ends with the message that 'not a single Sierra Leonean can claim thatthere is no need for him or her to confess and forgive. We are all responsible


for allowing our beloved country to slide into chaos and mayhem. Onlywhen we have dismissed all pretence can we truly move forward.'51 Mostcelebrated is a short passage from another contributor that is repeated several times throughout the final report and seems to function as the centralslogan of the SLTRC: 'The inspiration is let's sprint; if we can't sprint, let'srun; if we can't run, let's walk; if we also can't walk, then let's crawl; but inany way possible, let's keep on moving.'

At least as much as the longing for progress, the selection reflects anothercentral feature of the commission's discourse: a highly pronounced 'will tomodernity,' in the strong sense once eloquently articulated by Paul de Manas 'a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of reaching atlast a point that could be called a true present, a point of origin that marksa new departure.'52 As Bishop Humper has put it in a spe~ch: A decade after'darkness descended on our country,' the commission is 'about new beginnings' and the 'construction of a new Sierra Leone.'53

It is only from the perspective of this longing for progress and this willto modernity combined with a strong engagement with nation building thatthe stranger and more ambiguous features of the commission's work canbe understood. The ambiguity of the message about the need to 'forgivebut not forget' and the claims about the healing capacities of remembranceonly becomes fully manifest when the formal account established in thecommission's final report is contrasted with the tensions that are reflectedin the transcriptions of the actual victim hearings. 54 During these hearings,the commissioners argued that, besides the personal therapeutic gains thatit would bring, the public recalling of the burdened past was a duty to thebeloved country and to the progress of the nation. Time and again, testifying victims are thanked for taking part in 'this nation building process wecall TRC,' congratulated for 'helping the commission to help the nation,' orcalled 'brave' and 'patriotic.'

Most victims, however, do not seem to have been very convinced bythe commission's message about healing and reconciliation. Many of themstressed that there could be no peace without justice, and a widespreadanger was vented about the suspicion that the government and the truthcommission were primarily concerned with reintegrating perpetratorsrather than caring for the victims. The need for financial help or materialcompensation obviously was the most important reason for many victimsand survivors to come forward to the commission. At the end of almostevery testimony, the commissioners were asked what they planned to do inorder to change thevictim's state of continuing deprivation. Generally, thecommissioners react to these questions by arguing that the gain of testifying is psychological, that the commission helps to ensure that the past neverreturns, that its mission is to help communities rather than individuals, andthat the progress of the nation is the most important.

Besides the disappointment about the SLTRC's inability or unwillingness to give material or financial assistance, the victims' testimonies also


manifest a great confusion about, or even reluctance toward, the commission's project of redemptive remembrance. A considerable number of victimsseem to have interpreted the mission of the SLTRC as a quest to 'forgiveand forget.' Take for example the following witnesses who state that they'know we have to forgive, forget and reconcile,' or who want to 'thankthe commission because they are teaching us to forgive and forget.' Othervictims, who did note that the SLTRC's official slogans in fact demandedthat victims 'forgive but not forget,' repeatedly questioned the reasons forthis urge to remember. As one victim puts the question straightforwardly:'Why is it that after going through all these sufferings with all the painsin our heart, you still ask us to narrate it again?' Initially the commissioners respond to these questions by narrating a standardized answer aboutthe necessity of cleaning festering wounds and the need to heal the nationby creating a historical record. The following rather paternalist lines byBishop Humper are typical and therefore illustrative:

What you are saying is the opening up of wounds. Some of you will notunderstand what we are doing now, but later you will. Nobody will tellyou that you will ever forget about that. Many things have happenedin this country. Until we know what has happened to people like you,we will continue to remain in misery in this country. It takes pain andagony and suffering when talking about it afresh. Do you have anyother question?

However, at a later stage, the commissioners seem to give in, and, in contrast to the rhetoric of the media communications and the final report,they stop stressing the need to remember and instead merely urge victimsto forgive and reconcile. First the commissioners stop correcting victimswhen they once again attribute the demand to 'forgive and forget' to thecommission. Later on commissioners wish victims 'hope and courage tomove forward and forget about the past,' or they state that the commissionindeed asks them to 'forgive and forget.'

Interestingly, the SLTRC was highly preoccupied with the proper (re-)burial of the dead. As part of its mandate, the commission assisted someexhumations with the aim of proper reburial, visited and mapped a seriesof mass graves, and wrote a report on the need for memorials for the deadand disappeared.55 During the public hearings, the commissioners oftenasked whether the dead had received proper burial rites and whether anytraditional ceremony still had to be performed to appease the dead. Ascommissioner Prof. Kamara puts it: 'So many people have died withoutany proper burial and something has to be done to carry out the ceremonies that would put their souls at rest and also satisfy the sensibilities ofpeople.' The truth commission also actually took part in some rituals ofclosure meant to appease the dead. In visits to mass graves or places of


massacre, the commissioners often invited traditional leaders or healers toperform cleansing rituals and pour libations in order to appease wandering spirits and comfort the ancestors. Possibly pressured by a report of theNGO Manifesto '99 that confirmed that most Sierra Leoneans 'still' heldtraditional animist beliefs and were convinced that some crimes awake theanger of the ancestors and thus asked for ritual intervention, the Truthand Reconciliation Act of 2000 indeed allowed the truth commission toseek assistance from traditional and religious leaders. 56 While partly recognizing the potential value of traditional 'spiritual justice' in which perpetrators undergo cleansing and purification, the commission warned thatsome of the mechanisms were 'in conflict with a culture of human rightsand perpetuate a culture of violence.'57 Other mechanisms are consideredin harmony with the commission's objectives. 1'n addition to the pouringof libations, the commissioners describe the ritual covering of children'sbodies with mud and ashes that are subsequently cleansed in the river tosymbolically wash them from their past. 58

Given the commission's will to distance, break with, or even forget aboutthe past, and given its direct engagement with traditional rituals aiming atthe appeasement of the haunting spirits of the past, it can be argued thatthe discourse of history in the SLTRC primarily served to perform a sortof 'exorcism.'

POPULAR RESISTANCE TO IRREVERSIBLEHISTORICAL TIME

Contrary to the impression created by the commissioners, the truth commission's project of redemptive remembrance has not been welcomed unanimously.59 Public hearings seldom attracted the audiences that were hopedfor, and often the commission had difficulties in mobilizing enough peopleto testify publicly. Remarkably, the reluctance to cooperate with the truthcommission this time did not come primarily from unwilling perpetratorsor from victims who feared that the commission was an exercise in forgetting or that the historicization of the past would facilitate impunity. Rather,it originated in the broader population, and ironically-given the commission's painstaking attempts to 'appease' the past-it was based on the fearthat the commission's truth telling would revive or conjure up the past.The anthropologist Rosalind Shaw attributes the resistance to redemptiveremembrance to the local existence of alternative strategies of social recovery that involve what she calls 'social forgetting.'60 In a report written forthe United States Institute of Peace, Shaw warns that the idea that truthtelling has therapeutic efficacy and leads to reconciliation is based on aWestern 'culture of memory' deriving from North American and Europeantraditions. 61 Talking about her experiences in the north of the country, Shawargues that many Sierra Leoneaos prefer to forget the conflict and that they


show a great reluctance to discuss it publicly, fearing this will reproduce theevents. As one of her respondents puts it, 'The more you portray this kindof thing, the more you encourage it.'62 Even when victims testified beforethe truth commission, Shaw argues, they often did so in a way that reducedas much as possible the risk that the violence could return as a part of thepresent. In certain parts of Sierra Leone, alternative 'memory practices'have developed that are incompatible with the 'verbal remembrance' of theSLTRC. Social forgetting, Shaw writes, 'is a refusal to reproduce the violence by talking about it publicly. [ ... ] Social forgetting "unmakes" pastviolence and "remakes" ex-combatants as new social persons.'63 In 2002Shaw saw how social forgetting was used for the reintegration and healingof child and adult ex-combatants.64

Interestingly, the option for social forgetting and the rejection of verbalremembrance by parts of the Sierra Leonean population are closely relatedto a specific conception of the relation between past and present that differs strongly from the one implied by the notion of irreversible historicaltime. To get a grasp of this conception of the past and to understand howit relates to the option for forgetting, we can once more focus on the ethnographic work of Shaw.65 In northern Sierra Leone, Shaw writes, peoplesometimes narrate a myth of origin that includes a cataclysmic transitionfrom an old world to this one. This previous world was an 'angry' world,populated with short animal-like people and full of war, killing, abductions, and enslavement. That is why God, according to the narrators, covered that world, literally turning it upside down: 'It was taken and turnedover, [ ] The first things, all the bad ones, they were pressed under-neath The first people, those short people, they came and troubled theworld. That was why God turned them over. He made a new world again.'66As Shaw states, the story separates the time of these first people from thatof ourselves; it narrates a radical discontinuity through the (literal) burialof the past. The discontinuity, however, is far from complete, and this pastlying underneath can sometimes turn up and emerge in the present again.People can find traces of the first world if they dig wells and latrines, orthe old angry world can be conjured by violent conflicts in the present.Closely related to this past remaining present underneath and related to thetradition of ancestor worshipping, Shaw argues, memory in Sierra Leonecannot be conceived as a purely cognitive activity directed merely at storing and retrieving information; rather, it creates a relationship betweenoneself and the person or event remembered. Consequently, for many SierraLeoneans, the verbal and public recollection of violent events is, contraryto what the SLTRC says, not desirable because it connects the violence tothe person remembering and risks rendering it present again.67 Once again,then, although for opposite reasons than the ones discussed in the previouschapters, the resistance against (aspects of) the truth commission's work isprimarily directed against the irreversible time of history and inspired by aview that does not hold the past to be entirely absent or distant.


ICONCLUSION

IAcCording to Giorgio Agamben, each culture in the first place relates tola particular experience of time, and creating a new culture is impossiblejwithout altering this experience. 'The original task of a genuine revoluItion,' Agamben therefore argues, 'is never merely to "change the world,"but also-and above all-to "change time." '68 What Agamben remarkslabout the 'genuine revolution' can also be said to be true about peace proIcesses or about the creation of a culture of peaceful coexistence after ajperiod of violent conflict. One of the primal aims of peace negotiations canlindeed be described as the creation of a 'peacetime' that breaks with theIforegoing 'conflicttime.' The attempt to create a rupture between the 'then'land the 'now' is clearly manifested, for example, in the highly performativelanguage of peace treaties such as the ones of Abidjan and Lome, in whichthe instantaneous break with the violent past is firmly stated by means of adeclarative formula. It is from this same perspective of a performative politics of time, I propose, that use of a historical discourse in the context of theSierra Leonean truth commission has to be understood. More than merelydelivering an 'impartial historical record' or rendering a 'clear picture of thepast,' the stress on history and especially on the irreversible time of historyhad to assure the population of Sierra Leone that the conflict is over, thatit belongs to another chapter or era. It is only from this perspective that thestrangely ambiguous position of the commissioners on the issue of remembrance or forgetting can be comprehended: In relation to the principal aimof distancing the irrevocable past, the seemingly total opposition betweenremembrance and forgetting apparently turns out to be of relatively minorimportance. The example of the peace treaties of Abidjan and Lome alsohas to make us attentive of the fact that performativity and politics of timedo not always work. The mere fact that the performative wording of thepeace declaration of Abidjan in 1996 had to be repeated almost word afterword in the peace declaration of Lome in 1999 shows that there is alwaysa risk of failure.

The SLTRC, as Chairman Bishop Humper remarked, was first and foremost about the creation of 'new beginnings'; this, however, has been a veryhard assignment in a country where extreme acts of violence for so longhave been returning in seemingly endlessly repeating waves. At certainoccasions the commissioners themselves seemed unconvinced that a breakwith the past had decisively been made, and as we have seen, they sometimes even rebelled against the frame of the time of history that had beenimposed on their commission through its founding legal act. This doubt onthe side of the commissioners themselves might help us to explain why theywere never able to completely convince large parts of the (rural) populationto participate in the project of the truth commission even while this population often shared the commission's aim of 'appeasing' the past.

Preliminary ConclusionWhat Are Desaparecidos andDisturbed Ancestral SpiritsTrying to Tell Us About History?

In order to accept the irreparable, he has become a historian of thepresent.

P. Petit on H. Rousso1

History's goal and ambition is not to exalt but to annihilate what hasin reality taken place.

P. Nora 2

The recent 'historical turn' in the context of transitional justice at firstglance seems to carry with it the promise of a greater ethical mandate forhistory. Moreover, the practical engagement of historical discourse in postconflict contexts seems to bridge the old gap between a detached academic'history' and the more committed ways of relating to the past that are commonly referred to as 'memory.' In reality things turn out differently.

Let us reconsider some of our findings. In the previous chapters I haveargued that the rather ambiguous 'use' and 'abuse' of historical discourses,in the field of transitional justice, can (at least partially) be understoodfrom the perspective of a politics of time. While I do not want to suggestthat commissioners consciously engage in this politics of time (as if it werea philosophical conspiracy) and while I am aware of the risk of oversimplification, I think it can be argued that truth commissions primarily turnto history in order to impose the irreversible time of history on events thatare generally (still) considered to belong to the time of jurisdiction or oncontexts where a 'consciousness of catastrophe') has torn down the faithin the progressing, erasing, or healing powers of time. 'Proper historicalconsciousness' and the stress on chronology have to 'distance' the painfulevents that took place during the conflict and turn them into a matter ofthe past, clearly differentiated from the present. In the context of transitional politics, history does not primarily provide historical continuity butis, rather, used to provoke a sense of historical discontinuity. While useof historical discourse at first glance seems to be directed at the historical


past itself, its major..aim, in fact, is the construction of a 'simultaneous' or'contemporaneous' present freed from the haunting past. In more abstractterms, it can be said that historical discourse is introduced in the contextof transitional justice in order to transform the irrevocable past into anirreversible one.

Several reasons can be summed up in order to answer the question ofwhy exactly there is such a strong need for this introduction of the irreversible time of history and for historical discontinuity in post-conflictcontexts. Revolutions, Bruce Ackerman stresses much like Agamben, firstand foremost cut time in two, breaking off a Before from a Now, and thesame, I have argued above, counts for negotiated revolutions or peace settlements.4 The stress on historical discontinuity can help successor statesto claim a new identity and clear themselves from historical 'debts,' so asto enable them to focus on the present and the future. If 'new nations'so numerously start digging into their shameful histories of conflict andatrocity today, it is primarily to stress that these histories are past andtherefore do not belong to the nation's (political) present. Moreover, themere existence of 'deviant' temporal orientations and different forms ofremembering could be considered as a potential threat to the 'project ofsimultaneity,' on which, Benedict Anderson has argued, nation building isbased. Although it is hard to assess their effectiveness, truth commissionswith the help of a historical discourse attempt to contribute to the creationof what one could call a 'civic simultaneity/contemporaneity' by affectingpeople's temporal orientations and by publicly proclaiming what belongsto the nation's (political, social, cultural, legal, etc.) present and what mustbe considered past.

Most important, however, the very demand for forgiveness, and thepromise of non-repetition (e.g. expressions such as 'never again'-'nuncamas') on which the project of national reconciliation is founded, is basedon the idea of historical irreversibility. In the absence of this idea of irreversible time-when trust in the distancing capacities of time have brokendown or when crimes and atrocities are not (yet) considered to be past andgone-arguments for forgiveness become far more questionable and morally inopportune. Why? Because very few are willing to forgive evil deedsthat are still going on and because the promise of non-repetition only canbe interpreted as deeply cynical if crime and atrocity are experienced as still'in the present' or not yet over.

In order to understand exactly how a historical discourse can 'work'in dividing past from present and in declaring people's experiences to bepast, it is useful to look at the different ways in which past and presentare generally conceptualized. Most of the difficulties in understanding theidea of the past being 'alive' in the present, according to Preston King, reston a certain confusion about what we mean by past and present. 5 In orderto categorize the different meanings we attribute to these correlative butmutually exclusive notions; King distinguishes between a 'chronological

Preliminary Conclusion 85

time,' signifying an abstract temporal sequence, and a 'substantive time,'referring to a concrete eventful sequence. Relying on chronological time,two senses of the present can be discerned, each defined by its duration:the 'instantaneous present' and the 'extended present.' Both presents areboxed in between past and future and have a purely chronological character. But the first defines itself as the smallest possible instant dividing pastand present (the moment, the point-like 'now'), while the second refers toa more extended period of time (e.g. a day, a year, a century) whose limitsare arbitrarily chosen but give the present some body or temporal depth.Because of the meaninglessness and arbitrarily chronological character ofthese presents and corresponding pasts, historians often use a more substantive frame of reference based on criteria that are themselves not temporal. The first of these substantive notions is the 'unfolding present.' Aslong as a chosen event (negotiations, depression, war, etc.) is unfolding, itdemarcates a present; when the event is conceived as completed, the time inwhich it has unfolded is called the past. King remarks that this is the onlysense in which we can say that a particular past is 'dead' or 'over and donewith.' He immediately warns, however, that any process deemed completedalways contains other sub-processes that are incomplete. Therefore, it isvery difficult to preclude any actual past from being part of, working in, orhaving influence on this unfolding present.

In addition to the three presents already described (the instantaneous,extended, and unfolding), King mentions a fourth, which he calls the'neoteric present.' Drawing a parallel to the dialectics of fashion, he notesthat we often distinguish between events that occur in the present but areexperienced as 'ancient,' 'conventional,' or 'traditional' and those eventswe perceive to be distinctively characteristic of the present, seen as 'novel,''innovative,' or 'modern.' Historical periodization, seemingly dependent onchronological time, according to King, is first and foremost an exercise inapplying the dialectics of substantial notions of time. While every particular notion of the present excludes its own correlative past (e.g. unfashionable Goth kids constituting a neoteric past cannot be part of the neotericpresent, which is all about wearing fashionable pink), this does not hold fornon-correlative senses of the past (e.g. the unfashionable Goth kids belonging to the neoteric past are an undeniable part of the extended chronologicalpresent called 2011). A present thus can be penetrated by non-correlativesenses of the past that in a 'substantive' sense stay alive in that present.King explains, 'The past is not present. But no present is entirely divorcedfrom or uninfluenced by the past. The past is not chronologically present.But there is no escaping the fact that much of it is substantively SO.'6

By defending this notion of the interpenetration of the past and the present, Preston King relativizes their absolute divide. He also enables us tounderstand how historical discourse, in the context of transitional justice,actively supports the transition to a new nationhood by enforcing a symbolic break between present and past. We could say that this discourse gets


its exorcising and allochronistic capacities by mixing substantive notionsof time with a naturalized chronological sense of time that has a strangelyimpalpable character and is hard to question. The active juxtaposing of thepresent and the past, the new and the old or the actual and the inactual-infact involving claims about substantive time-is disguised by a 'veil' ofnaturalized chronological time. The discourse of history already 'works'by claiming that certain phenomena belong to its epistemological realm orobject. In positing certain events as past, and in differentiating them fromthe present, the irreversible time of history in fact actively exorcises thehaunting past, at least as much as merely describing or analyzing it. Thiscan explain the oddly obsessive way in which truth commissions often referto atrocities as 'crimes of the past,' even if they happened very recently,sometimes just before the establishment of the commission itself, and are ingeneral not experienced as past at all. The description of crimes as belonging to the 'past' in a chronological sense provokes the connotation thatthey are 'past' in the substantial sense of 'passed,' 'dead,' or 'over and donewith.' Yet this is often more wish than reality.

The function of historical discourse in the field of transitional justice couldthen be described by evoking Derrida's figure of the coroner who certifiesdeath in order to inflict it, 'declare the death only in order to put to death.'7This phenomenon does not seem to be unique for transitional justice. Michelde Certeau noted a similar tendency when he described modern history asa form of sepulcher, promising the dead a proper funeral in the form of awritten discourse but demanding that they stay numb: 'writing speaks ofthe past only in order to inter it.' 'Thus,' he aptly noted, 'it can be said thatwriting makes the dead so that the living can exist elsewhere [ ... ] A societyfurnishes itself with a present time by virtue of historical writing.'~

Creating a space for the living can, of course, hardly be called a badthing. Is there not a long intellectual tradition in the West that associatesthe very idea of enlightenment and even rationality with the insight that theliving should free themselves from the authority of both dead ancestors anddead traditions? Moreover, what else than mere pathology can the hauntingpast be from a clinical point of view? Still, does not this same enlightenedreasoning all too easily adopt a forward-looking gaze that often results inthe reign of impunity? Is this not often the case in relation to the transitionaljustice dilemma? Did people such as F. W. De Klerk, Augusto Pinochet, andscores of army generals not all too suddenly turn into the greatest defendants of this rational solution? Or, to state it a little more bluntly, does notthe irreversible time of history, with its stress on the absence or distanceof the past, inherently benefit perpetrators?9 Indeed, as Matthias Fritschhas argued, such logic can easily be used to legitimize totalitarian policiesin which the reference to a better future can justify suffering in the pastand in the present. lO Moreover, as I have argued in the introduction and inthe chapter on the South African TRC, the contribution of the irreversibletime of history to the project of nation building by creating a sense of civic

Preliminary Conclusion 87

contemporaneity comes with serious side effects: despite or maybe becauseof its part in the project of simultaneity, it tends to become 'allochronistic.'Therefore, it indeed can be asked whether the 'historical turn' in the field oftransitional justice always serves an ethical cause.

It is precisely from this perspective that the fairly strong resistanceagainst the work of truth commissions should be understood. In each ofthe three cases that we analyzed, the protest against, or uneasiness with,the approach of the commissions seemed to revolve around their stress onirreversible historical time and, more exactly, around the notions of 'temporal distance' and of an absent past. Victims speak with a different voiceto the past. In order to understand this, it is important to recognize thatremembrance, more than just being about historical truth and the recollection of facts, also has ethical dimensions and therefore should be considered a 'moral practice.'11 In contrast to the 'language of exorcism' thatcharacterizes the TRC's historical discourse, the 'memory of offence' nurtured by victims and survivors often speaks a 'language of fidelity.'12 Thisfidelity, indeed, frequently expresses itself in terms of the denial of absenceor distance. Instead of dispelling the ghosts of the past by (re)enforcing thedivide between past and present and turning the 'persistence' or 'proximity' of the irrevocable into the safe 'absence' of the irreversible, memory ofoffense ignores the 'hierarchies of time,' refuses to let the atrocious past go,and keeps the irrevocable irrevocable in all its frightening c1oseness.13

It is in this context of resistance against the irreversible time of historythat the spectral language of desaparecidos, disturbed ancestral spirits,and returning dead has to be understood. Ghosts and returning ancestors are essentially about the past,and more precisely about the irrevocablepast and its ambiguous 'presence' in the present. As argued in the chapteron Argentina, the spectral figure of the desaparecido primarily has to beseen against the background of the Madres' rejection of irreversible historical time and their construction of an alternative concept of time thatcan be identified as irrevocable. 14 Similarly, in Sierra Leone, the reluctancetoward the work of the truth commission betrays a conception of the pastthat strongly contrasts with the notions of the absent and distant pastalthough, unlike the Madres, this resistance aims at a social forgettingbased on fear of enraging ancestral spirits and the return of the dead.Already before the outbreak of the civil war, Rosalind Shaw found outthat certain ritual practices involving spirits and witchcraft in Sierra Leonehave to be interpreted as forms of memory.JS More specifically, she claims,these ritual practices remembered the Atlantic slave trade and the terrorsit brought to the populations of West Africa. Quite similar to what is happening with the legacy of the recent civil conflict, the Atlantic slave tradeand the subsequent internal slave trade were not remembered verbally butin a less discursive way were elaborated as practical memories in a ritualform. The Slave trade, Shaw argues, is 'forgotten as history but remembered as spirits.'16 Shaw shows how the historical processes associated


with the coming of the Atlantic slave trade are reflected in a transformation of local spirits from predominantly benign and protective beingsinto threatening haunting entities that resemble the disturbing presence ofslave traders. Also, she argues, the current techniques for ritual protectionagainst sorcery or spirit attacks closely resemble the protective strategiesthat were once used to counter the actual attacks by the slave traders wholong ago roamed the landscape of Sierra Leone.17

The belief in ghosts, spirits, and witchcraft is of course not exclusivelyfound in Sierra Leone. In the West, ghosts have been returning at least sinceantiquity, often demanding justice and always subverting irreversible time.18

Recently, an upsurge of the spectral can be observed in several parts of theworld, and many commentators argue that instead of being a remnant ofold and dying traditions, this phenomenon is here to stay.19 Although thepre-occupation with ghosts or spirits is not restricted to post-conflict contexts, several scholars indicate the existence of a close link between thispre-occupation and the legacies of violent pasts in many places in the world.One of the most notorious examples is that of Mozambique, where despite,or rather because of, a blanket amnesty and state-imposed forgetting, deadsoldiers are reported to have been returning ever since the end of the brutalcivil war. These dead soldiers mostly return to the realm of the living in theform of so-called Magamba spirits, and they do so to fight for justice or torevenge themselves. 2o Although the government of Mozambique adheres toa modernization discourse and considers magical practices as things of thepast that must be superseded, scholars have argued that spirit possessionand exorcism in fact play a crucial role in the handling of that past and inthe processes of healing, cleansing, and social reconciliation. 21

Similarly, the American anthropologist Erik Mueggler, in a village inrural Southwest China, encountered rituals of exorcism that he interpretedas being part of a 'subversive strategy of time by telling ghost stories.'22Once again, the figure of the specter related to memories of violence: thistime, those of the victims fallen during the Great Leap famine and theCultural Revolution. Although the belief in ancestral spirits is of coursevery old, Mueggler argues that in the villages he studied there has been anupsurge of wild ghosts during the last decades, and interestingly he statesthat the coming of these ghosts should be considered to be a direct reactionto the specific vision of time that has been a cornerstone in the socialistpolicy of the central state in China. Bearing some remarkable resemblancesto the Argentine case I discussed above, Mueggler interprets the figure ofthe specter as part of a strategy, 'to defy official rhetoric about time as alinear road or path, and the selective freedom from responsibility for pastviolence that this rhetoric implied.'23

Part 11

5 A Hard Time Thinkingthe IrrevocableWhy It Is So Difficult to Understandthe Haunting Past

By the same token, when the premodern vanishes, when the peasantry shrinks to a picturesque remnant, when suburbs replace thevillages and modernity reigns triumphant and homogeneous over allspace, then the very sense of an alternate temporality disappears aswell [ ... ]

F. ]ameson 1

INTRODUCTION

Early in the twentieth century, Georg Simmel explicitly raised the questionof what it means for something to be considered 'historical.' After havinglisted some criteria that are necessary but insufficient to call something so,Simmel argued that the answer first and foremost has to be sought in thepossibility of exact temporal location. In line with this reasoning, Simmelwas able to define the historical succinctly in the following expression: 'Agiven aspect of reality qualifies as historical when we know how to fix it ata certain position within our temporal system.'2 At first sight this seems tobe a rather trivial truism or, at best, a matter of merely methodological concern, but in fact it has something interesting to it. First, in contrast to thecommon view that simply equates 'history' with 'the past' or 'past reality,'the carefully chosen expression 'a given aspect of reality' and the posing ofthe question itself imply that there are (or can be) dimensions of reality thatare not (or cannot be) recognized as historical. In addition to that, Simmel'sdefinition also shows that a concept of time, or a 'temporal system,' morethan being merely an analytical or ordering framework can function as afilter or sieve that sheds light on certain parts of reality and obscures theexistence of other parts.

In this chapter I will start from this insight in the 'filtering' function ofconcepts of time or 'temporal systems' in order to attempt to answer thequestion of why, despite the clear fact that it is widespread and of greatimportance, it is so hard to take seriously the notion of the irrevocable

:92 History, Memory, and State-Sponsored Violence

lor haunting past from the perspective of academic historiography and of'rlmodern (Western) historical thinking in general. Academic historiographyand certainly broader modern historical thinking are far too fragmentedand diverse to attribute a single unified chronosophy or temporal system tothem. Accordingly I will not attempt to describe such an overarching modern concept of historical time. Rather I will discuss a number of disparatebut related conceptualizations of time and history that are widespread andvery influential in academic historiography and modern historical thoughtand of which I believe they compel us to think of the past as irreversible andrestrain us from fully taking into account the irrevocable. Starting from ananalytical rather than a strictly historical perspective, I will focus on (1)the adoption of an absolute, empty, and homogenous time; (2) the influenceof historicist and (3) modernist conceptualizations of history; and (4) thetendency to treat history as an entirely secular matter.

ABSOLUTE, EMPTY, AND HOMOGENOUS TIME

In his 'Theses on the Philosophy of History,' Waiter Benjamin famouslyfulminated against the common habit of historians to work with an 'emptyand homogeneous time' and to fil1 this time up with a mass of facts thatare threaded together like the 'beads of a rosary.'3 The widespread belief inthe possibility of a universal and continuous chronological ordering of al1historical facts indeed reveals a dependency on a linear concept of time thatfunctions like an abstract container that exists as an empty and homogenous entity prior to, and independent from, the events and facts bestowedon it. According to Giorgio Agamben, the modern concept of historicaltime results from the secularization of the rectilinear and irreversible timeof Christianity (influenced by Judaism) that has been sundered from itsnotion of an approaching end and of any meaning except for that of a'structured process in terms of before and after.'4 There probably is sometruth to this when it comes to the issue of linearity. Christianity, it is oftenargued, broke with the cyclical theories of time that (at least on a philosophicalleve1)5 were influential in Greek antiquity because it depended ona narrative of spiritual progress and because the idea of an endless cyclicalreturn of events denied the significance of unique events such as the comingof Christ.6 However, although it may offer a (partial) explanation for theprevalence of linear representations of time, the influence of Christianityalone cannot account for its conceptualization as empty and homogenous.

More directly, the idea of an empty and homogenous time-that infinitely extends forward and backward from an arbitrary point, is universal1y applicable, and is believed to be thematically and interpretativelyneutraF-has to be related to the more recent philosophical discussions thatled early modern scientists to posit the existence of an absolute mathematical time that passes independently from physical movement or subjective

experience. The discussion about whether time has an autonomous existence or whether it depends on the more fundamental existence of earthlyand celestial movement has a long history, with important thinkers fiercelysupporting each of the two positions. l)lato and Aristotle, for example, differed strongly on this issue, respectively defending an absolute or at leastan autonomously existing concept of time and a more relative notion oftime. During the seventeenth century, however, the work of some prominent scholars, including Rene Descartes and Isaac Barrow, decisively movedthe debate toward the idea that time is absolute and exists on its own, aposition that would remain almost uncontested until the early twentiethcentury, when it was refuted by Einstein's theories of relativity.8 The mostinfluential formulation of this absolute time came from the hand of IsaacNewton, who in his 'Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica' (firstpublished in 1687) famously spoke about an 'Absolute, true, mathematicaltime, that of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably without relationto anything external.'9

Although as an abstract mathematical time it is reversible,lO severalscholars claim that Newton's conceptualization of time has been of majorimportance for the genesis of modern historical thinking and modern historical chronosophy. Newtonian time, Donald Wilcox argues, conceptual1y substantiates the objectivistic and universalistic ambitions of modernchronological reasoning because it posits itself as more fundamental thanany relative or subjective time and because it claims to encompass all ofspace. ll As Philip Turetzky formulates it, 'In the Newtonian system, eachindivisible moment of duration exists everywhere, while the whole of spaceexists at each moment.'12 In addition, the stress on the atomistic nature oftime-resulting from Newton's calculus that conceived of time as a sumof infinitely small but discrete units13-conceptual1y supports the commonview that represents the historical process as an endless succession of events.Rather than being merely conceptual, however, Donald Wilcox claims thebonds between the modern dating system and Newtonian time are alsohistorical. Just like Newton's conception of absolute time, the BC/AD dating system came into existence during the seventeenth century, when it waspioneered by, among others, the Jesuit scholar Domenicus Petavius. In fact,Newton himself, in one of the chronological studies he wrote, was amongthe first to use the BC/AD system that would only become widespread inthe eighteenth century.J4

It is important to stress that the modern system of absolute dating demandeda lot of effort and a long period to develop and that its emergence wasfar from self-evident.15 Before Newton, dating systems were not absolute,and, lacking a concept of absolute time, scholars generally had no senseof abstract stretches of chronological time (like centuries or decades) thatcould contain and characterize a group of events occurring within them.As Wilcox puts it, 'Dates in [pre-Newtonian] time were tied to specific


themes, events, and moral lessons, and they gave a meaning and shape oftheir own to the events they dated. [ ... ] For historians before Newton thetime frame did not include a group of events; a group of events contained atime frame.'16 Consequently, historians working before the advent of absolute time mostly used relative dating systems and created a wide varietyof differing 'episodic' chronologies adapted to the events that were beingdescribed. New dating systems were created when the development of newhistorical identities required the synchronization of events that would nothave been considered temporally related in earlier chronologies.J7 In Greekantiquity, for example, chronology often related to the historical life of apolis or the events of a certain battle, and dating system only grew moreencompassing with the organization of the Olympic games, which conceptually synchronized the lives of the participating city-states. 18

In intellectual terms, the rise of both absolute time and absolute datingcan therefore, according to Phi lip Turetzky, be described as the product ofthe development of new mathematical techniques and a gradual looseningof the ties between time and change or motion. The idea that time is morefundamental than motion, he claims, is essentially modern.19 The broadersocio-cultural roots of the abstraction of time, however, can be traced backto factors already extant in the Middle Ages. A first important step towardthe experience of abstract time was taken already when Benedictine monasteries started to divide the day into (canonical) hours and started to organize life according to schedules based on abstract temporal entities insteadof natural events (such as noon and sunset). A second and closely relatedinfluence on the gradual development of the notion of abstract time camefrom the creation and dissemination of the mechanical clock. The incentive to develop the mechanical clock probably also came from the medievalmonasteries, and the English word clock is etymologically related to theMedieval Latin word clocca and the French word cloche, signifying 'bell.'20Bells played a central role in the regulation of public life in Medieval societies. Because mechanical clocks were the first devices that enabled humankind to mark equal, abstract, and discrete units of time with precision,and because they were able to do so independently from the movementof the celestial bodies, it is no coincidence, according to Philip Turetzky,that the notion of abstract uniform time developed in the same historicalperiod as the mechanical c1ock.21 'Moreover,' Turetzky writes, 'mechanicalclocks facilitate precise determinations both of what time it is and of howmuch time has passed in a given period. This encourages the tendency touse spatial metaphors referring to lengths of time etc.'22 Third, the gradualrise of abstract time can be related to the rise of a money economy and to achange in labor arrangements during the fourteenth century, when employers in the textile industry began to pay workers according to the time theyworked rather than by piece. 23

Except for the difficult and gradual genesis of the idea that time passes'independently' of the events it measures, Newton's idea that time flows

A Hard Time Thinking the Irrevocable 95

'equably' also broke with most earlier popular experiences of time. Despitethe invention of the mechanical clock, time for most people long remained(and remains) inhomogenous. In many cultures, strict (often religiouslyinspired) regulations existed (and still exist) concerning what can and cannot be done on certain days, indicating that time was/is often experiencedas uneven in quality. At least since the Romans and certainly in the MiddleAges, popular superstition, for example, stressed the uneven character oftime by claiming the existence of lucky and unlucky days.

It is the process of homogenization, together with the process of abstraction described above, that makes it possible for historians to describe historical time as an endless linear continuum of passed historical presents.Referring to the words of the French theorist Jean-Fran~ois Lyotard, wecould speak about the creation of a 'presented time' (instead of a merely'presenting' time), which moves from time experienced as a 'now' [nun]to a more detached time conceived as 'this time' [dieses Mal], in whichit is presupposed that 'one time' [einmal] is equivalent to 'that time' [dasandere Mal]. 24

HISTORICISM

A second way of conceptualizing history and temporality that is widespreadand that can make it hard to recognize the irrevocable is the so-called 'historicist' one. I hesitate to use the term 'historicism,' however, because it isnotorious for its complexity and for the number of different or even contradictory meanings ascribed to it. Let me therefore first explain the specificmeaning that I have in mind.

A quick survey of the literature referring to the word 'historicism' immediately reveals at least six different uses, some of which are the exact opposite of each other. 25 Starting with the use that is the furthermost removedfrom what I have in mind, historicism can refer to a protestant Christianeschatology that states that the fulfillment of certain biblical prophecies(those of the book of Daniel and the book of Revelation) literally takesplace on earth throughout history until today, in contrast to those whosituate the fulfillment of these prophecies in the future. Second, there isthe particular meaning developed by the philosopher Karl Popper in hisinfluential work 'The Poverty of Historicism.'26 Here historicism refers toholistic and teleological theories (most notably branches of Hegelianismand Marxism) that pretend to be able to predict the future on the basis ofsets of inescapable historical laws and that Popper criticized as inherentlytending toward totalitarianism. Popper's use of the word 'historicism' hasbeen criticized as idiosyncratic because it does not seem to have any connection at all with the more conventional uses of the term. Yet, as GeorgIggers notes, the Soviet ideologists whom Popper attacked did themselvesseem to use the word 'historicism' in this way. 27 Third, the expression 'new


historicism' refers to a branch of literary criticism that was developed in the1980s under the influence of the critic Stephen Greenblatt and that arguesthat literary texts always must be considered as a product of their historicalcontext. Fourth, historicism can refer to the historical school that developedin Germany during the nineteenth century following the pioneering workof Leopold von Ranke. This 'German historicism,' then, signifies the riseof a critical historical methodology based on historical facts and contrastswith previous 'uncritical' forms of historiography that are thought to havebeen closer to myth. Fifth, historicism can refer to the philosophical position of an anti-Enlightenment 'critical movement' that reacted against therationalist thought that dominated the eighteenth century.28 Thinkers suchas Vico, Herder, and Dilthey largely rejected the application of Enlightenment rationalism to the domain of history, argued that every product ofhuman intellect had to be interpreted in its historical context, and refutedthe use of historical laws modeled after the laws of physics. This meaning ofthe term historicism, thus, stands in opposition to the one attached to it byPopper. Sixth and closely related to the foregoing use, historicism can referto the rise of a broader worldview that sees the entire world as a product ofhistorical change and that denies the existence of unchanging essences. Inthis worldview, time and temporality are shifted toward the very center ofsocial life, so as to make historical and mutable even the norms and valuesthat previously had been believed to be 'of all times.' Friedrich Nietzsche,indeed, referred to this idea that the world is subjected to a constant process of becoming (instead of simply being) to claim the relativity of all values, and Ernst Troeltsch in this context famously spoke about the 'crisis ofhistoricism.'29 When I speak about historicism, I am referring to these lasttwo related meanings of the term.

These two meanings were brilliantly articulated by the sociologist KarlMannheim, who in 1924 wrote that the historicist principle had not onlydeveloped into an 'invisible hand' that steered the cultural sciences withan extraordinary force but also had permeated everyday thought. 30 ToMannheim, historicism was both a 'new theoretical superstructure' thatreplaced the previous 'doctrine of the supra-temporality of Reason' and acorresponding broader worldview ('Weltanschauung'). Both scientific position and worldview attributed an increased role to time and temporalityand fully recognized the dynamic dimensions of life. However, Mannheimwarns, historicism does not automatically result from the writing or recording of history. Since Herodotus, he writes, history has been recorded in lotsof ways-'as a plain chronicle of fact, as legend, as an edifying object ofmeditation, as a spiritual picture book, as rhetoric, as a work of art'-andhistoricism only comes about when history is written from the 'historisticWeltanschauung.'31 In Mannheim's words, 'It is not historiography whichbrought us historicism, but the historic process through which we livedhas turned us into historicists.'32 Although historicism itself is a product of

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history and going through a dynamic process of change, it is deep rootedand widespread, according to Mannheim, who was writing in the 1920s.Its systematic place 'corresponds to that of the "metaphysics" of earliertimes.'33 About historicism's relation to these earlier times, Mannheim isclear: '[it] came into being after the religiously determined medieval pictureof the world had disintegrated and when the subsequent Enlightenment,with its dominant idea of a supra-temporal Reason, had destroyed itself.'34

The historicist worldview thus breaks with the preceding rationalistworldview primarily because of its different conception of historical change.To understand what is new about the historicist way of understanding historical change, we can turn to some insights of Frank Ankersmit. Ankersmit,much like Mannheim, describes historicism as 'the result of a historicizationof the a historicist conception of social and political reality that was adoptedby eighteenth-century natural-law philosophy.'35 To be sure, the eighteenthcentury rationalist worldview did not exclude the possibility of change, noreven of radical change, but according to Ankersmit it always attemptedto identify an unchanging substance underlying change, and moreover italways tended to ascribe change to external causal factors. This worldviewconceived reality as made up of entities that essentially remain the sameover the course of time: It contained a notion of the universe consistingof things like mountains, rivers, stones, chairs, or pieces of organic material that retain their essences even while acquiring or losing certain contingent properties in the course of their histories. Ankersmit speaks about a'substantial ism' that predisposes us to use a language of cause and effect.The substantialist ontology and the purely causalistic language, however,according to Ankersmit, soon fall prey to their own contradictory dialectics because no strict line can ever be drawn between the substance of anobject and its contingent properties that change over time. Because of thisblurry limit between the essential and the contingent, it is hard to retain theidea of an unchanging substance that is external to the chain of cause andeffect-in Ankersmit's words, there is 'a permanent and persistent urge toinvite causal language to invade the domain of the,substance.'36 Enlightenment historiography, Ankersmit claims, only was able to solve its own paradoxes and explain 'substantial' historical change (change permeating intothe substance/essence of things) by falling back on literary techniques andrhetoric. Gibbon's famous 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,' whichdescribes the history of the Roman empire from the perspective of an essentially unchanging subject but nevertheless struggles with the question of itsfall, which it does not want to attribute to merely external factors, serves asAnkersmit's prime example of both this paradox and its rhetorical evasion.Historicism, in contrast to the Enlightenment view of history, should, then,primarily be seen as a denial of unchanging essences or as a historicizationof substance. As Ankersmit puts it, 'For the historicists historical changecould not be restricted to what is merely peripheral; indeed, "substantial"change was seen as the true domain of historical research.'37


Ankersmit's thesis has been criticized on historiographical grounds byGeorg Iggers, who disagrees with the sharp distinction drawn between the'ontological realism' of Enlightenment historiography and the historicaloutlook of classical historicism. According to Iggers, a close examinationof Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall' shows that Gibbon did take into accountinternal changes in the Roman empire; in addition to that, he argues, classical historicists such as Ranke and Droysen sometimes assumed that thesubject of their study preserved its identity over time. Ranke, for example,treated states as substances, or even persons, which despite partial changesremained essentially the same throughout their histories.

Iggers' critique serves as a good warning that historical reality neverunambiguously fits analytical schemes, but Ankersmit's insight, nevertheless, seems valuable and valid to me. In an argumentation quite similar toAnkersmit's, the philosopher Nathan Rotenstreich explains the historicistposition as the rejection of any trans-historical 'substratum' underlying history: 'In other words, the substratum is never a subject whose existencetranscends the process of events. [... ] we are not entitled to assume a factor that does not become, and which exists independently as a substratumfor becoming.'3s And, as Giorgio Agamben writes, the central idea governing the nineteenth-century concept of history was that of 'process.'39 Thetendency to historicize substance and to see change everywhere became animportant characteristic of most Western intellectual projects ever since.The nature of things, it is often said, has to be situated in the history oftheir becoming. Although historicism originally started as a way to defendbranches of the human sciences against the philosophy of natural law, thehistoricist stress on mutability and temporality in the twentieth centuryinvaded even the sphere of the natural sciences. Historicism, moreover,underlies some of the most influential philosophical projects of our time.Think, for example, of Richard Rorty's radical historicism that promisesto 'treat everything-our language, our conscience, our community-asa product of time and chance.'4o Think of Foucault's claim that in 'effective' history there are no 'constants' or that: 'Nothing in man-not evenhis body-is sufficiently stable to serve as basis for self-recognition or forunderstanding other man.'41 Think of the tireless efforts by the Americanphilosopher joseph Margolis to prove that nothing remains invariant inhistory.42 Or, think of David Roberts who can tellingly title his overviewof the thought of some of the most influential critical thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth century, 'Nothing but History.'43

MODERNISM

A third conceptualization of time and history that is widespread and thatrenders it difficult to take seriously, the irrevocable, is the one that perceives history as bringing genuine historical novelty and that believes that


this novelty justifies a strict qualitative division of the temporal dimensionsof past, present, and future. I will call these closely related beliefs 'modern' or 'modernist.' Admittedly, my use of the term 'modern' is based on arather specific meaning, but nevertheless it is in line with the insights of someprominent scholars working on the subject. By associating modernity withthe belief in historical novelty and in the possibility of a radical break withthe past, I interpret this concept in a qualitative rather than a chronological sense.44 Whereas the modern social experience has historical roots andbecame dominant in the specific span of chronological time that (in English) is called modernity, and to which it is, thus, empirically or organicallyrelated, it should not be equated with this chronological period because itsdissemination has not been, and is not, universal (not everybody living todayexperiences in a modern way) and because some thinkers could possibly havehad modern social or cultural experiences long before the modern epoch.

Using the label modern in this qualitative sense to describe a characteristicof a discourse on history might seem a little strange at first sight. The literary critic Paul de Man, for example, once declared that, 'Among the variousantonyms that come to mind as possible opposites for "modernity" [... ]none is more fruitful than "history".'45 For de Man, modernity, in the firstplace, must be associated with 'radical renewal' or even forgetting: It is anobsession with a tabula rasa, with new beginnings. In the field of estheticism, the term 'modernity' originally indeed referred to artistic creations thatbroke with any orientation on the past or on tradition. When Charles Baudelaire in 1863 first used the word modernite in his essay 'Le Peintre de la viemoderne,' he associated it with the truly new, the ephemeral newness of thepresent, on which the modern artist had to focus, disassociating it from theovervaluation of the eternal and the old evident in classical aesthetics.46 Asimilar understanding of modern experience as a continuously recapitulatedbreak with the past, and bent on a socio-cultural orientation toward thefuture or the new, has been defended by jiirgen Habermas. Habermas claimsthat the concept of modernity 'expresses the conviction that the future hasalready begun: it is the epoch that lives for the future, that opens itself up tothe novelty of the future.'47 Modernity, he writes, for its socio-cultural orientation refuses to borrow any models supplied by other epochs, and insteadit tries to create its normativity out of itself. Because it defines itself by itsopenness toward the future, the modern world constantly has to redefine itsown epochal beginning with each moment that gives birth to the new. It istherefore characteristic for the time consciousness of modernity to set off 'themost recent [neuesten] period from the modern [neue] age.'4S In Habermas'words, 'A present that understands itself from the horizon of the modernage as the actuality of the most recent period has to recapitulate the breakbrought about with the past as a continuous renewal.>49

In summary, the modern experience with its love for the future and its rejection of the old seems more an opposite to history than a suitable candidate


for describing a feature that is widespread in academic historiography andcurrent Western historical consciousness. Nevertheless, the German intellectual historian Reinhart Koselleck has argued that the modern 'opening up' of the future and the related idea of progress have been of crucialimportance in the genesis of the currently dominant Western concept ofhistory. For Koselleck, modernity [Neuzeit] primarily has to be understoodas a new experience of time, literally a 'new time' [neue Zeit].50 In order toexplain this new experience of historical time, he introduces the abstractanalytical concepts of 'space of experience' [Erfahrungsraum] and 'horizon of expectation' [Erwartungshorizont]. These two concepts accordingto Koselleck can be used to analyze all kinds of socio-culturally determinedconceptions of time and historicity because they take on a 'meta-historical'status: Every human being, independent of whether (s)he even recognizesthe existence of past and future as separate temporal dimensions, has someexperience or memory about what has happened and certain expectationsor hope about what will happen. Despite or, better, thanks to this highdegree of generality, every conception of time or historicity can be definedby the specific way it interrelates a space of experience and a horizon ofexpectation. Moreover, the tension between the two in their ever-changingpatterns-a space of experience changes each time a new expectation isfulfilled or negated, and a changed space of experience in its turn can giverise to a new horizon of expectation-offers a phenomenological explanation for the experience of historical time.

According to Koselleck, the space of experience and the horizon of expectation of most people up to the eighteenth century were closely knit togetherand sometimes almost coincided. With up to 80 percent of the populationcultivating the land, Europe until approximately 200 years ago was a 'peasant society' that lived within the cycle of nature. Disregarding changes inthe structure of social organization, fluctuations on the market, and monetary fluctuations, Koselleck claims, the everyday world mainly dependedon what nature brought. The skills to manipulate or defend against naturewere passed on from generation to generation, and technological innovations existed but generally took so long to become established that theyseldom really created an experience of rupture that conflicted with previous experiences. In urban life, too, strict guild regulations ensured thateverything remained more or less the way it was. Koselleck admits that thispicture is oversimplified, but it nevertheless serves to make his point that:

The expectations cultivated in this peasant-artisan world (and noother expectations could be cultivated) subsisted entirely on the experiences of their predecessors, experiences that in turn became thoseof their successors. If anything changed, then it changed so slowlyand over so long a time that the breach separating previous experience and an expectation to be newly disclosed did not undermine thetraditional world. SI I

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Of course, this cannot be said to be true for all strata of society in the sameway: In the world of politics and the intellectual world, certain events (forexample, the crusades, the discovery of the new world, the Copernican revolution) broke up existing experiential space and created new expectations.Generally, however, according to Koselleck, it was widely believed until theearly modern period that the future could not bring anything fundamentally new: 'The Solomonic wisdom of nil novum sub sole was equally validin the world of peasants and of politics, even though individual cases mightbring surprises.'52 Because it set an immovable limit to the horizon of expectation and bound the future to the past, the Christian doctrine of the FinalDays had a great influence on this disbelief in historical novelty: 'Until theexpected end of the world, sinful human beings (as seen from a Christianperspective) would not change; until then, the nature of man (as seen froma humanist perspective) would remain the same.'53 If expectations did gobeyond previous experience, they usually were not related to this world butinstead to the Hereafter and the apocalyptical End of the World. 54

All of this, according to Koselleck, changed in the second half of theeighteenth century. At that moment, technological innovations and theeffects of what later would be called 'progress' resulted in an increasingbreak between space of experience and horizon of expectation. Koselleckconsiders this break to be the basis of modern time consciousness with itsstress on the dimensions of novelty, irreversibility, and unicity. He speaksabout a process of temporalization [Verzeitlichung]: 'Time does not justremain the form in which all histories take place, but time itseif gains ahistorical quality. Consequently, history no longer takes place in time, butrather through time. Time is metaphorically dynamized into a force of history itself.'55 Commenting on the institution of the new calendar after theFrench Revolution, Koselleck states that what is really new about modernity 'is the idea of being able to begin history anew by accounting for it interms of a calendar.'56

This, of course, had repercussions for the conception of the past. Onthe one hand, the rise of new expectations about the future resulted in achanged valence of the study of the past, which no longer convincingly couldbe legitimized as offering vital lessons for present or future life. The onceso influential 'Historia Magistra Vitae' topos slowly dissolved because, asKoselleck puts it, 'It became a rule that all previous experience might notcount against the possible otherness of the future. [... ] History, processualized and temporalized to constant singularity, could no longer be taughtin an exemplary fashion.'57 On the other hand, it was exactly the 'discovery'of progress that brought with it the 'discovery' of the historical world: 'Thehistorical and the progressive views of the world have a common origin.They complement one another like the faces of Janus. If the new time isoffering something new all the time, the different past has to be discovered and recognized, that is to say, its strangeness which increases with thepassing of years.'58 This 'discovery' of the historical world evidently has


implications for the formation of academic historiography and historicalmethodology. It was only with the qualitative separation of the past fromthe present and the future that history could become a science:

Since then it has been necessary to develop special methods that teachus to recognize the different character of the past. Since then it has beenpossible that the truth of history changes with changing time, or, to bemore exact, that historical truth can become outdated. Since then historical method has also meant having to define a point of view from whichconclusions can be drawn. Since then an eyewitness is no longer the authentic principal witness of an event; he will be questioned in the light ofchanging and advanced perspectives that are applied to the past.59

The 'discovery' of the historical world, however, involves much more thansimply these matters of critical method. In fact, Koselleck argues, the veryconcept of history as a collective singular was only constituted toward theend of the eighteenth century. The idea of history as a unified process andthe related axiom of historical uniqueness and individuality only came intoexistence after the idea of progress opened up the future and people cameto believe they could 'make' history. Until the eighteenth century, Koselleckargues, past and present were enclosed in a common historical plane, andpeople had no notion of 'history' as a unified epistemological object. Manyspheres that today are considered to possess an innate historical characterwere treated in terms of other premises, and there was no common denominator for all those histories-res gestae, pragmata, and vitae-which haveaIJ been collected and stamped 'history.' As Koselleck explains:

If anyone had said before 1780 that he studies history, he would have atonce been asked by his interlocutor: Which history? History of what?Imperial history, or the history of theological doctrine, or perhapsthe history of France? As said earlier, history could only be conceivedtogether with an associated subject that underwent change or uponwhich change occurred.60

Of course one should take care of following Koselleck too far in his oftenvery schematic presentations, and a certain skepsis toward his analysis isappropriate. The Medievalist Kathleen Davis, for example, rightly criticizes Koselleck for the stasis or 'attemporal paralysis' that he attributes tothe Middle Ages and the often strongly binarized and linear way in whichhe separates the Medieval from the modern. 61 Davis speaks about a 'foundational exclusion of "medieval" time,' and she argues that this positing ofa timeless Middle Ages is part of a politics of per iodization that backs upphilosophical and political claims about the sovereignty and legitimacy ofmodernity.62 In line with this criticism of Koselleck's binary logic, one alsocould question whether the dominant modern historical worldview is notmuch more a 'plant of slow growth'63 rather than a product of a relatively


short and concise epochal 'revolution' as Koselleck seems to believe. Onecould doubt whether phenomena such as profoundly changing experiencesof time and history can be pinpointed to a decade. It might be safer to takethe dates mentioned by Koselleck to be primarily symbolic or to choose aless precise chronologica[ delineation, like Lynn Hunt, who argues that theconcept of time most commonly used by academic historians took hold instages between the end of the seventeenth and the middle of the nineteenthcentury.64 Nevertheless, Koselleck's idea of a 'Sattelzeit'-a turning pointaround the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century in which the conceptions of time and history fundamentally changefinds confirmation in the recent work of several other thinkers. The Frenchhistorian Franr;ois Hartog, for example, similarly situates the watershedbetween what he caIJs the modern and the pre-modern regime of historicity [regime d'historicite] around the end of the eighteenth century.65 Justlike Koselleck, Hartog situates the particularity of the prevailing modern regime d'historicite in the qualitative separation of past and presentand in an increased attention to the passing of time. Hartog describes themounting of this modern concept of historicity by referring to the introduction of the formula autres temps, autres moeurs-'other times, othermanners'-and he adds that in the modern regime of historicity, the past isgenerally considered to be 'passe.' In order to illustrate the relatively swiftsuccession of one regime of historicity by the other, Hartog refers to thewritings of Chateaubriand, which according to him historically have tobe located precisely on the breaking point, with some of the early essaysstill submerged mostly in the 'old' regime and some of the later essaysalready belonging in part to the 'new' vision on historicity. Chateaubriand's thinking, according to Hartog, in large measure falls in betweentwo regimes of historicity. The topos historia magistra vitae, for example,had already become unconvincing for Chateaubriand, whereas he was notyet able to comp[etely break with it. Although his work is permeated bythe experience of temporal acceleration and the idea of historical process,Chateaubriand did not yet stress the separation of past and present thatcharacterizes the scientific historiography of the nineteenth century. Forhim, Hartog argues, the past was still to be situated in the present, and theundead are still haunting the [iving.66

The American historian Peter Fritzsche, too, states that around 1800,'something quite new' developed in both elite and popular conceptions oftime and history all over EuropeY The French Revolution and the subsequent Napoleonic wars gave rise to a widespread perception of historicaldiscontinuity and transformation or, as Fritzsche puts it, a 'restless iterationof the new.'68 Much like Koselleck and Hartog, Fritzsche stresses that theexperience of radical change and historical novelty led to the destructionof the exemplary status of history as teacher of life as well as to the 'discovery' of, or even obsession with, the 'new past.' The popular discoveryof the 'strangeness' of the past and the new sensitivity to the omnipresenceof historical 'loss' in the decades following the French Revo[ution revealed


themselves in a strongly increased interest for ruins, material relics, and souvenirs of the past. These ruins and relics no longer merely stood for decayand death, as was the case during most of the eighteenth century, but alsocame to signify different lives and even subjectivities that once existed inanother historical plane and were now absent. Interestingly, Fritzsche alsoremarks that the perception of a break between past and present broughtwith it a new sense of contemporaneity and of the synchronicity of time tothe population of Europe, this despite the simultaneous development of theidea of national differences and the exclusion of the non-West.

SECULARISM

A fourth approach to historical time that is widespread in academic historiography and historical consciousness in the West, and that renders it difficult to recognize the irrevocable past, is that of secularism. The questionof whether modern historical thinking and modernity in general are genuinely secular in nature or whether they are merely superficially secularizedversions of an older and more authentic religious vision of history has beenthe stake of heated debates among philosophers and intellectual historians. The most influential voices in this 'secularization debate' undoubtedlycame from Karl Lowith, who in 1949 posited the 'derivative' status of modern historical thought and philosophy of history and from Hans Blumenberg who in the early 1960s reacted to Lowith by defending the autonomy,authenticity, and secularity of modernity.69

However, once again I have to start with a disclaimer and say that I willnot enter the Lowith/Blumenberg debate here, but that I will refer to a veryspecific interpretation of the concept of secularity. I am inspired by theCanadian philosopher Charles Taylor's claim that 'secular' does not primarily mean 'not tied to religion' but more fundamentally refers to 'a certain kind of time.'70 'Secular,' Taylor explains, is derived from 'saeculum,'a century or age.71 The use of the term secular that is common today-inwhich it is contrasted to religion or stands as one part of the oppositionsecular/regular clergy-draws on that original meaning in a specific way:'People who are in the saeculum, are embedded in ordinary time, they areliving the life of ordinary time; as against those turned away from this inorder to live closer to eternity.m 'Secular,' thus, refers to 'ordinary time' orthat which is related to ordinary/profane time, as opposed to that whichconcerns the affairs of eternity.

Now, to understand what is 'secular' or at least 'secularizing' aboutmodern approaches to historical time, we have to contrast these to premodern or non-modern notions of time. Before the advent of the modernistworldview, Taylor argues, people generally perceived time as multilayered or multidimensional. Ordinary time, in pre-modern understandings,always existed in relation to what Taylor calls 'higher times,' by which itwas 'surrounded' or 'penetrated' and which gathered it together or held it


in place.73 Taylor remarks that one arguably could also simply refer to this'organizing field for ordinary time' by the philosophically and theologicallymore common term 'eternity,' but he defends his choice for the expression'higher times' by explaining that (a) pre-modern thinkers conceived of morethan one kind of eternity, and (b) these 'eternities' did not exhaust the phenomenon of higher times.74

Taylor gives three examples of higher times that came into existence atdifferent historical moments but that, for most of ~JVestern history, existedside by side in a complex mixture. The first and best known example canbe found in the philosophy of Plato, who saw worldly sub-lunar realityas a mere reflection of the 'really real' full being that had an unchanging and eternal status. For him, and his later European inheritors, ordinary time was merely a moving and imperfect image of eternity, which atonce explains why higher times are higher. Although this Greek notion ofeternity remained influential in Western thought, another idea of eternitydeveloped in Christianity. The Bible's message about a universe that wascreated by God and functioned according to his plan implied that whathappened in time was very real and really mattered. As Taylor explains,'God enters into drama in time. The Incarnation, the Crucifixion, happenedin time, and so what occurs here can no longer be seen as less than fullyreaI.'75 Mainly influenced by the thought of Augustine, Latin Christendom,therefore, came to reconceive eternity as 'gathered time.' Instead of startingfrom the Greek idea of 'objective' time related to processes and mO'lement,Augustine famously reflected on the idea of a 'lived' time. According to himthe dimensions of past and future are gathered into a continuous whole orinstant in the human mind. Extrapolating on this human feature, Augustine held that God had the capacity to gather all of time into one instant,so that all of time was simultaneously present to him in a kind of 'nuncstans.' In other words, God's instant as eternity. To these two examples ofhigher times Taylor adds a third one that he calls a 'time of origins.' Unlikethe two notions of eternity described above, this later higher time was notdeveloped by theologians or philosophers but originates in folk tradition,not only in Europe but almost everywhere. The time of origins is a GreatTime, an 'illud tempus,' in which the world was created and the order ofthings established. Although situated in a remote past, this time of originscannot be grasped meaningfully in secular or chronological time because itcan re-appear or be re-approached and, therefore, never can be consideredreally past. As Taylor writes, 'The Great time is thus behind us, but it isalso in a sense above us. It is what happened at the beginning, but it is alsothe great Exemplar, which we can be closer to or farther away from as wemove through history.'76

Since the Enlightenment, these higher times have increasingly lost influence and have been expelled or incorporated by a linear chronologicaltime that does not leave much room for the idea of other times. It is thislong process of rejection of higher times and of positing of time as purelyprofane, eventually resulting in a 'radically purged' time consciousness,


that, according to Taylor, underlies 'secularization' in its many different social forms.77 The enthronement of 'secular time' as a unique andabsolute time frame, which increasingly comes to function as a preciousresource that should not be wasted, is also closely related to processes ofdisenchantment and disciplination. According to Taylor, therefore, secular time, more than any other aspect of modernity, deserves Max Weber'sdescription of a stahlhartes Gehduse ('iron cage').78 Moreover, it was onlyby the exclusion of higher times and their replacement by secular timethat the modern notions of absolute simultaneity and chronological transitive logic could be posited. As Taylor remarks, 'As long as secular timeis interwoven with various kinds of higher time, there is no guaranteethat all events can be placed in unambiguous relations of simultaneity andsuccession.'79 According to Taylor, the 'strong transitivity rule'-that if Ais before Band B before C, then A is before C, or in a quantified version,that if A is long before B, and B long before C, then A is very long beforeC-underlying modern chronological reasoning, did not always hold insocieties (the medieval European, for example) that saw ordinary time asinterrupted by higher times that could bend, warp, or even re-order it.Even events that were far apart in ordinary time were often conceived asclosely linked. As Taylor explains, referring to the relation of prefiguringfulfilling that was believed to exist between the sacrifice of Isaac and theCrucifixion of Christ:

These two events were linked through their immediate contiguousplaces in the divine plan. They are drawn close to identity in eternity,even though they are centuries (that is, 'aeons' or 'saecula') apart. InGod's time there is a sort of simultaneity of sacrifice and Crucifixion.Similarly, Good Friday 1998 is closer in a way to the original day ofthe Crucifixion than mid-summer's day 1997. Once events are situatedin relation to more than one kind of time, the issue of time-placingbecomes quite transformed.80

A thesis similar to the one of Charles Taylor is found in the work of Sylviane Agacinski, who argues that the modern Western worldview primarilyresults from what she calls 'the retreat of the eternal.'8! In order to demonstrate what is so particular about modernist time consciousness, Agacinskialso contrasts it with the Platonic and Neoplatonic traditions, which buildtheir philosophies around an idea of eternity. Without having lost all desirefor what lasts, modernity came to stress temporal passage and started todescribe the world primarily in terms of the ephemeral instead of the permanent or eternal. Just like Taylor, Agacinski argues that modernity, byontologically cutting the ties with the eternal, not only opens thought totemporality and history but also immediately breaks with the divine or atleast with the ancient idea of the divine.

A Hard Time Thinking the irrevocable lU I

FORMULATING THE MAIN COMPLAINT

Criticizing the notion of absolute, empty, and homogenous time, the historicist account of historical change, modernist belief in a strict dividebetween past and present, and the secularizing rejection of 'higher times'is not something that one should do light-heartedly. Taken together theseelements constitute a chronosophy that embodies great critical potential.Doubtlessly it was primarily this chronosophy that made intellectuals suchas Karl Mannheim and Hans-Georg Gadamer speak so admiringly aboutmodern historical consciousness, respectively calling it an 'intellectual forceof extraordinary significance, [ ... ] the very basis on which we constructour observations of the socio-cultural reality,' and 'very likely the mostimportant revolution [ ... ] of the modern epoch.'82 For Richard Rorty, historicism holds the promise of humanity's intellectual emancipation: 'Thishistoricist turn has helped free us, gradually but steadily, from theologyand metaphysics, from the temptation to look for an escape from time andchance.'83 In an argument that resembles Taylor's thesis on secularization,Rorty states that radical historicism could bring us to a point 'where we nolonger worship anything, where we treat nothing as a quasi divinity.'84

Moreover, as Wilcox remarks, the rise of the concept of an absolutetime that exists as a kind of abstract container independent of the eventsthat are gathered in it has been crucial for the development of the idea of aglobal simultaneity. This concept enables modern thinkers to synchronizeevents and people on a massive scale without necessarily demonstratingthe existence of any concrete historical relations. 85 The Newtonian axiomthat all of space exists at the same instant of time could well be consideredan important source of what Elisabeth Deeds Ermarth calls history's 'OneWorld Hypothesis.'86 The idea that historical reality occurs through anendless series of discrete instants enabled historians to create the moderncritical historical methodology, which largely depends on the hypothesisthat major historical events and processes are made up of smaller eventsthat can be found directly in the primary sources. As Wilcox explains, 'Thecontinuous and universal qualities of Newton's time and space have made itpossible for historians-as well as the natural scientists-to view the basiccomponents of reality not as processes or organic wholes but as a series ofdiscrete events that can be placed on a single time line and at a single pointin space.'87 In addition to that, the mounting of a critical historical stancewas related to the homogenization of time because this homogenization,as Bernard Williams argues, provoked the demand that remote, 'legendary' events be explained in the same manner as events that happened justyesterday.88 Moreover, that same homogenization of time together with itsuniversalization, according to Lynn Hunt, has great historiographic importance because it creates the possibility for historical revision. Without thenotion that all natural events are equally part of time and that everyone's


time has the same 'ontological weight,' she claims, there would be no history of African Americans or of the environment today.89

However, although embodying great critical potential, the elementsdescribed in this chapter together also make up a chronosophy that is notin touch with important parts of the experience of historical agents andthat severely restricts us in recognizing the full complexity of historicalreality-most notably in recognizing the persistence of the 'haunting' orirrevocable past. The notion of an empty and homogenous time, the stresson constant and generalized change, the belief in a strict divide betweenpast and present, and the belief that all experience can be situated in asingle 'secular' time, all of this has led many modern thinkers to treat thenotions of past and present as mutually exclusive and to reduce the pastto the 'absent' or the 'distant.' Without maintaining any 'desir d'eternite'or, being an atheist, upholding any nostalgia for a religious or enchantedworld, I agree with Charles Taylor when he claims that what from anEnlightened point of view seems a 'purged' chronosophy is actually animpoverished one.

Despite their clear intellectual advantages, the notion of an absolute,empty, and homogenous time and the chronological reasoning that is basedon it can hardly account for the plurality of 'lived' or 'subjective' notionsof time and cannot integrate temporal experiences that are non-linear or'non-contemporaneous.' Due to its universalist ambitions, absolute, empty,and homogenous time actually not only manifests an incapacity to integrate different experiences of time but also a straightforward intolerance toother temporalities. In relation to Charles Taylor's secularization thesis, itcan be argued that the rejection of higher times in a sense ended up in thepositing of absolute, empty, and homogenous time as the highest time ofall. The 'intolerant' or even 'imperialist' character of this notion of time hassince long been proclaimed and criticized by scholars working in the fieldsof subaltern and post-colonial studies. People such as Dipesh Chakrabarty,Ashis Nandy, and Sanjay Seth, for example, have repeatedly stated thatmany non-Western experiences cannot be integrated into academic historiography due to the latter's chronosophy.90

When it comes to the conceptual incapacity to take seriously the phenomenon of the irrevocable, more specifically, the most obvious explanation is that the notions of absolute secular time, of historicist change, andof a strict delimitation between past and present simply turn the idea ofa persistent past into a logical inconsistency. In fact, modern historicistchronosophy carries with it a clear analytical bias toward the 'event' andrenders it difficult to conceive of the (ontological) reality of any form of persistence. Evidence of this difficulty can, for example, be found in the fiercediscussions about the virtual or actual status of social structures, whichoften come down to a discussion on the nature of historical time. 91

The fact that mainstream modern historical thought, as Koselleckshows, not only historically but also conceptually emerged as the correlate


of a belief in progress and of a worldview saturated by the idea of constantchange and historical novelty might explain why the problem of theorizingthe persistence irrevocable past never seemed of great urgency to this intellectual tradition. In fact, it often seems as if modern notions of historicaltime are designed to equate 'historical' with 'change' or 'novelty' and tosee no persistence. See, for example, the following reasoning set up by JamRusen about the nature of history and of historical time:

History is originated in the change of generations; but it only developsas a specific time relation if the immediacy of a relationship (like thatbetween parents and children) is extended into a mediated relationship.Temporality acquires a historical dimension only if it connects twotime horizons that differ in quality; only under these circumstancesdoes one need to differentiate between one's own time and that of others, between the presence of one's own Lebenswelt and the past as apassed Lebenswelt. 92

Today, generations keep passing, but the idea of historical progress for lotsof people is no longer convincing. For large parts of the world's population,a realistic horizon of expectation still or again closely resembles or evencoincides with an often tragic space of experience. It has become clear thatthe idea of progress belongs to a specific and finite historical context, andin the absence of this progress it is not unthinkable to put it in Rusen's terminology, that present Lebenswelten no longer distinguish themselves thateasily from passed ones. In this context, we have to deny history altogetherto many people and societies as long as we continue to negate the irrevocable or the persistent past and narrowly understand 'history' as identical toqualitative 'change' or 'novelty.' Even if it was only for this consideration,we need to rethink historical time and look for the possibility of an alternative chronosophy.

o Searching for Other TimesSome Critiques of the Absentand Distant Past

NTRODUCTION

I

In the preceding chapter, I attempted to demonstrate that the genesis oflabsolute, empty, and homogenous time, the historicist account of historical[change, the modernist stress on the disjuncture of past and present, andthe secularizing rejection of higher times add up to a chronosophy that isInot only an intellectual tour de force that provoked a new way of seeing:the world but also, and at least as much, an ingenious 'way of not-seeing'Iparts of that world. This chronosophy, I have claimed, allows us to see onlyla 'living' present that is fully present and a 'dead' past that is fully absent[or distant, obscuring all that cannot be neatly categorized as either purelyIpast or purely present, attached to an exact temporal location in a linearIchronology or fit into the historicist model of change.

Luckily, however, the above chronosophy, although widespread andinfluential, has never held absolute sway over academic historiography andbroader historical thought in the West. Ever since its rise, but most notablysince the first half of the twentieth century, several aspects of the describedchronosophy have, in fact, been contested by thinkers who mostly formeda part of its tradition, often only wanted to modify it, and invariably heldingenious views of historical reality. Some thinkers have challenged thenotion of a singular empty and homogenous time, others have rejected theidea of perfect chronological synchronicity, and still others have questionedthe absolute break between past and present; several have been frustratedin some way or another by the representation of the past as irreversiblyabsent or distant.

In the hope of encountering an alternative chronosophy that is moreinclusive than the one discussed in the previous chapter-i.e. that enablesus to see the irrevocable and that less easily lends itself for exorcist andallochronist purposes-the next two chapters will discuss a selection of fiveinspiring and atypical critical conceptual reflections on time and history.In this chapter I will first discuss the chronosophical reflections by twohistorians: Fernand Braudel, who famously posited the existence of different temporal layers or dudes; and R. G. Collingwood, whose theory of

Searching for Other Times 111

're-enactment' includes an interesting rethinking of the relations betweenpast and present. Second, I will focus on two Marxist philosophers, ErnstBloch and Louis Althusser, both of whom, despite their differences, haveraised similar questions about the idea of historical contemporaneity andthe singularity of historical time. The next chapter will then be dedicatedentirely to the thoughts of Jacques Derrida and, more precisely, to histheory of 'spectrality' or 'hauntology' and his statements about the 'noncontemporaneity of the present with itself.' For each of the thinkers andcritiques treated, I will offer a short discussion of the extent to which theyoffer a viable basis to theorize the irrevocable. I chose to devote an entirechapter to the philosophy of Derrida because he offers the most radicaldeconstruction of commonsense notions of (historical) time and becausehis alternative 'spectral' concept of time, in my opinion, serves as a goodintellectual basis from which we can begin to conceive the more inclusivehistorical perspective that we look for.

Of course, one could object that the search for an alternative notion ofhistorical time should focus more on theories of time that during the lastcentury have been developed in the exact sciences, or instead that the searchfor an alternative chronosophy should draw its inspiration from the multitude of non-Western (or pre-modern) concepts of time. In reaction to thefirst objection, it can be stated that the natural sciences will not bring muchrelief. Several thinkers have convincingly argued that historical time cannotbe equated with, or reduced to, natural time or cosmic time, and even if onewants to break with the idea of an absolutely contemporaneous present,one cannot rely on relativistic physics because this discipline has no notionof a lived present.! The second objection cannot simply be rejected: Inspiration for an alternative chronosophy could indeed be drawn from severalcontexts. Although I would certainly not want that alternative chronosophy to be 'pre-historical,' inspiration could, for example, doubtlessly bedrawn from ancient conceptions of time or what Mircea Eliade has called'archaic ontology.'2 And although Western approaches to time have spreadalmost everywhere, non-Western cultures could similarly be an invaluablesource of inspiration in our search for a more inclusive chronosophy.

Nevertheless, focusing on the 'internal' critiques that developed withinor at the margins of the historiographic tradition in the twentieth centuryand in the West has advantages. I believe that Derrida is right when heargues that each deconstruction of a metaphysical system has to start fromwithin that system itself. Also the 'internal' focus confronts us with a seriesof critical reflections that are presented in a terminology and developed inan intellectual context that has direct and easily recognizable relev2111c'efor the academic historiographical practice. Moreover, although therecourse have been other thinkers within the Western tradition who haveengaged in critical reflections on historical time, the five thinkers who arediscussed in the next two chapters, because of their great diversity, offera good overview of the different sorts of frustrations that arose around


the absent or distant past during the twentieth century and the alternativeapproaches to historical time that have been formulated.

TWO HISTORIANS: BRAUDEL AND COLLINGWOOD

Fernand Braudel

Let us start this overview by taking a look at the undoubtedly best knownattempt to rethink historical time: Fernand Braudel's thesis that historycontains a plurality of times. Braudel first elaborated this idea in his dissertation 'La mediterranee et le monde mediterraneen Cl l'epoque de PhilippeII,' originally published in 1949. 3 In the preface to this masterpiece, heannounced that he wanted to organize his discussion of the history of theMediterranean world in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries around threedifferent times, which he, respectively, called geographical time, socialtime, and individual time. A focus on geographical time had to makepossible an inquiry into a history that is hardly changing or even 'almosttimeless.' It had to recount the history of man in relation to his surroundings-mountains, plains, and coasts, but also climates, seasons, and mostnotably the inland sea-'a history whose passage is almost imperceptible,[ ... ] a history in which all change is slow, a history of constant repetition,ever-recurring cycles.'4 The focus on social time served to uncover a historythat passes at 'slow but perceptible rhythms.' Braudel uses this notion totreat the history of economies, states, societies, and civilizations. Individualtime, finally, brings with it a focus on a more 'traditional' history, 'of brief,rapid, nervous fluctuations.' This is a history of political events~ which di~cusses not man in general but men in particular. Braudel admits that thistemporal level is the most exciting and the richest in human interest, buthe warns that it is also the most perilous. Historians who let themselvesbe guided only by the beacon of this individual time and are oblivious ofthe deeper currents of history will unavoidably get a distorted view andwill find themselves transported into a world missing a dimension, a worldthat is 'blind' or even 'bizarre.' Braudel, however, reassures his readers thatthe perilous world of the histoire evenementielle is 'one whose spells andenchantments we shall have exorcised by making sure first to chart thoseunderlying currents, often noiseless, whose direction only can be discernedby watching them over long periods of time.'5

The ideas about historical time that remain mostly on a practical levelin La Mediterranee were later, during the late 1950s, formulated moreexplicitly in a series of polemical articles. 6 It is in one of these articlesthat Braudel first introduces the French term duree and starts to speakabout a longue duree, moyenne duree, and courte duree. Again Braudelis clear about his preference for the longest time span. He repeats that'the short time span is the most capricious and the most delusive of all,'and that it is beloved primarily by the 'historians of yore.'7 For these


historians of yesterday, a day or a year might seem useful gauges, but forup-to-date historians, a change in traditional historical time has to takeplace. Several historians, he approvingly remarks, already have discovered the moyenne duree. However, he laments that very few focus on thelongue duree, which he sees at work everywhere in history. To name anexample of such a longue duree, Braudel refers to the existence of geographical constraints:

For centuries, man has been a prisoner of climate, of vegetation, ofthe animal population, of a particular agriculture, of a whole slowlyestablished balance from which he cannot escape without the risk ofeverything's being upset. Look at the position held by the movementof flocks in the lives of mountain people, the permanence of certainsectors of maritime life, rooted in the favorable conditions wroughtby particular coastal configurations, look at the way the sites of citiesendure, the persistence of routes and trade, and all the amazing fixityof the geographical setting of civilizations. 8

Besides geological and biological realities, Braudel discerns similar 'elementsof permanence or survival' in mentalities and cultural affairs. Admittedly,it is not an easy task for the historical profession to adapt to the longueduree, and the historian who wants to do so has to be ready to change hisstyle, his attitudes, and his entire way of thinking so as to adapt to a newconception of social reality. Still, at this stage, and only at this stage, Braudel adds, 'it is proper to free oneself from the demanding time scheme ofhistory, to get out of it and return later with a fresh view, burdened withother anxieties and other questions.'9

It is clear that the conceptions of history and temporality that Braudelexpresses are on several points fairly atypical for an academic historian.For Braudel, history is clearly not the constantly changing reality that it isvery often believed to be. Instead of conceiving of history as a process fullof historical novelty and loss, Braudel primarily sees endless repetitions andstable structures that stubbornly endure for long times.1O Because of hisfocus on the 'almost timeless' realities of the longue duree, he even does notseem to believe in the absolute divide between past and present. Braudel isnot impressed by the often-presumed otherness or strangeness of the past;for him the present is at least as strange as much of the past: 'history doesnot consist only in differences, in the unique and the novel-whatever willnot happen twice. Besides, the novel is never entirely new. It goes hand inhand with the recurrent and the regular.'11 Moreover, the present cannotbe fully comprehended either unless we conceive it from a certain distanceand as a composite of different forces and influences. As he formulates it:'Each "actuality" brings together movements of different origins, of a different rhythm: the time of today, alternately dates from yesterday, the daybefore yesterday, and all former times.'12 Consequently, the notion past forBraudel does not seem to have a resonance of absence or distance. His idea


of a plurality of times, however, seems to break most notably with the reliance on a time that is singular and flows equably. Indeed, when asked ata ripe age to reflect on his most important contribution to historiographyhe answered, 'My great problem, the only problem I had to resolve, was toshow that time moves at different speeds'!3

The answer to the question of why Braudel came to use these distinctiveconcepts of history and temporality or where exactly his particular notionof the past came from can take different directions. One could refer to thesubject of study that so profoundly caught Braudel's attention. The study of asubject as complex and extensive as the Mediterranean demanded an adaptedapproach, but in the preface to his dissertation, Braudel expressed his conviction that the sea, as one can still see it and admire it today, is the bestdocument about its own past existence that can be imagined.14 Similarly, inan autobiographical reflection written much later, he recounts his decision towrite a history of the Mediterranean as something that ripened during his longstay in Algiers, where he daily saw 'his' sea and where he got impressive viewsof it from the low-flying hydroplanes.L\ The continuous presence of the sea,and of other features of the Mediterranean landscape, thus somehow came tosignify the persistence of the past into the present. The autobiographical piecealso provides another, even more personal, explanation for the developmentof Braudel's atypical concept of history and his preference for the longue dureemore specifically: They could be seen as an existential response to the tragictimes of the Second World War, which Braudel spent as a prisoner of war inGermany. The German radio and newspapers but also the news from London on the clandestine receivers constantly poured in information on vexingoccurrences that the captives wanted to outdistance, reject, or even deny. Thebest way to do away with these occurrences for Braudel was to believe thathistory was written on a much more profound level:

Choosing a long-time scale to observe from was choosing the position ofGod the Father himself as a refuge. Far removed from our persons andour daily misery, history was being made, shifting slowly, as slowly asthe ancient life of the Mediterranean, whose perdurability and majesticimmobility has so often moved me. So it was that I consciously set forthin search of a historical language-the most profound I could grasp orinvent-in order to present unchanging (or at least very slowly changing)conditions which stubbornly assert themselves over and over again. 16

Except for the influence of the Mediterranean as a particular subject ofstudy, and the personal factor just mentioned, Braudel's choice for thelongue duree, of course, also can be related to the context of the FrenchAnnales school. The program of historiographical renewal set up aroundthe Annales journal, established in 1929 by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch,in the first place took the shape of a critique of the prevailing political history and the 'great men' perspective. The rejection of the idea that historyis made by a small elite of great individuals was, of course, not that new


and was shared by other intellectual currents at the time, but the originalcontribution of the Annales pioneers, as Paul Ricoeur remarks, is to besituated in the idea that the individual and the event have to be surpassedconcurrently.17 By favoring the longue duree over the shorter time spans ofthe histoire evenementielle, Braudel was thus indeed the faithful inheritorof the original historiographical program of the Annales that he alwaysclaimed to be. Braudel also was loyal to that original program when, duringthe 1950s, he argued that the different human and social sciences had topull down the disciplinary fences and hedges that separated them in orderto form one field of study. History and the other human and social sciences,he believed, share a potential 'common market' because they all shouldfocus on the 'plurality of social time' and become aware of the 'dialectics ofduration.'18 Because the social sciences often work with notions like socialstructure and often even suffer a 'horror of the event,' historians can onlyfacilitate the interdisciplinary integration of their profession if they recognize that the past is more than just a mass of facts and that this mass doesnot make up all of reality or all of the 'depth of history.'19

In the context of these interdisciplinary exchanges, we get to see anotherface of Braudel and his chronosophy. In two articles that discuss the relationbetween history and the social sciences, Braudel complains that the socialsciences from their side tend to evade historical explanation. 20 According toBraudel, this happens in two almost contradictory ways: On the one hand,some social studies are ahistorical because they take into account only themost 'actual' occurrences and look only into the most recent past, whereasother social studies are ahistorical because they transcend time altogetherand pretend to be able to identify timeless structures. Once confronted withthe ahistorical aspects of the social sciences, Braudel therefore starts criticizing not only the tendency to reduce reality to a succession of events butalso the tendency to work with what he conceives to be a too long timespan-a 'trop longue duree.' In the struggle against this trop longue duree,Braudel reinvokes the time of historians, and it reenters in the singular andas a universal. In fact, Braudel writes, the passage of time imposes itself onall the human sciences, but these other human sciences all too often ignoreit. 21 The time sense of historians, he concludes, in the end can never be thatof sociologists or philosophers because historians never allow themselvesto stand outside the 'time of the world,' which is irreversible and flows atthe rhythm of the earth's rotation. We now read that the different dureesare interdependent and that it is not so much time that is created by ourminds but the way we break it up: At the end of the historian's labors, allthe fragments of time reunite. The longue duree, the conjuncture, and theevent can without difficulty be fitted together because they are all measuredon the same 'scale.' 'For the historian,' Braudel writes, 'everything beginsand ends with time, a mathematical, godlike time, a notion easily mocked,external to men, "exogenous," as economists would say, pushing men, forcing them, and painting their own individual times the same color: it is,indeed, the imperious time of the world.'22


This reliance on an external, mathematical, and even 'godlike' time inorder to shield history from the more 'liberal' chronosophies of other humanand social sciences is an understandable but problematic move. It begs forsome serious questioning. What can be the status of Braudel's three timesin the face of this later 'imperious time of the world,' which clearly tendsto function as an abstract container time? How can the geographical, thesocial, and the individual times of Braudel ever properly be called different'times' if they all can be measured on the same scale? And most important,what to make of Braudel's critiques of the notions of time and temporality that we described in the previous chapter, if he is so swift in realigningwith these notions on the first friction with the chronosophies of other disciplines? Paul Ricoeur has rightly remarked that there is a 'surprising lackof rigor' in Braudel's expressions about the plurality of times: 'Braudel notonly speaks of short time and long time, that is of quantitative differences,but also of rapid and slow time. Absolutely speaking, speed does not applyto intervals of time but to movements traversing time.'23 Despite his lifelong interest in the different temporal layers of historical reality, Braudelshowed little interest in explaining the relation or interaction among theselayers. In fact, he never came much further than a repeated reference to the'dialectics of duration.' This lack of explicitation made Braudel's ideas ontime a fertile object of speculation for all kinds of commentators, and it lefthis beloved notion of the longue duree in a very vulnerable state. 24

Maybe we just expected too much. Braudel was, after all, a purebredhistorian, and his reflections on historical time were primarily meant to bepractical and methodological, rather than philosophical. Maybe we weremistaken to interpret Braudel's distinctions among a geographical, a social,and an individual time, or the different durees, as comprising a theory ofhistorical time rather than merely being 'distinction[s] within historicaltime,' as Lennart Lundmark claimsY Braudel's ambiguous position cannot provide us with the starting point for the alternative chronosophy thatI hoped to find. As long as it ultimately reinforces an external time thatsynchronizes and pushes forward everything like a godly hand, Braudel'schronosophy cannot be used to explain the irrevocable past. Still, Braudelwas sincerely and profoundly troubled by the irreversible time of history,with its stress on the absence or distance of the past. Although he neverreally managed to entirely break with it, his repeated attempts to do solegitimize his inclusion in this short overview.

Collingwood

For a second critique of the absent past, I turn to the British historian, philosopher, and archaeologist R. G. Collingwood and his theory of 'reenactment,' i.e. the theory that historians know the historical past by criticallyrethinking or reenacting it in their own minds. The concept of reenactmentis without doubt the best known but also the least understood part of Collingwood's philosophy of history. Many readers misinterpret the writings on


reenactment as merely methodological remarks explaining how historianswork or should work when studying the past. William Dray argues that thetheory of reenactment involves much more profound conceptual issues andmust be seen primarily as an epistemological reflection on how historicalknowledge is possible. 26 Dray is right about the epistemological aspects ofthe theory of reenactment, but a close reading reveals that this theory also isrelated to a profound rethinking of the notions past, history, and temporality. For Collingwood, the historical past cannot be dead or absent; as he putsit, 'As so re-enactable, [the historical past] is not something that has finishedhappening.m Needless to say, it is this aspect of the theory of reenactmentthat I am most interested in here. Before focusing on this alternative conception of historical time, however, let me take a moment to discuss the theoryof reenactment a little more elaborately and explain why it forced Collingwood to break with more traditional concepts of historical time.

Collingwood indeed starts his discussion of reenactment by raising an epistemological question. How, he asks, can historians have knowledge aboutthe past given the fact that the past no longer actually exists and thus cannever be studied empirically by perception? The historical past, Collingwood's answer goes, only can be known when the historian reenacts itin his own mind. 28 In order to do so, the historian first has to distinguishbetween the 'outside' and the 'inside' of historical events. The outside of anevent, Collingwood explains, includes all that can be described in terms of'bodies' and 'movements': 'the passage of Caesar, accompanied by certainmen, across a river called the Rubicon at one date, or another.'29 The insideof events, in contrast, refers to that which only can be described in termsof thought: 'Caesar's defiance of Republican law, or the clash of constitutional policy between himself and his assassins.'30 The historian, then,should never focus on one of these sides of the event while excluding theother: 'He is interested in the crossing of the Rubicon only in its relation toRepublican law, and in the spilling of Caesar's blood only in its relation toa constitutional conflict.'3! Historical events should always be consideredin their completeness, they have to be 'penetrated' so that the underlyingthought can be discovered and 'rethought'32 In order to make the above alittle more concrete, let me reproduce an example given by Collingwoodhimself: the example of an imaginary historian who is reading a certainedict of an emperor in the 'Theodosian Code':

Merely reading the words and being able to translate them does notamount to knowing their historical significance. In order to do that hemust envisage the situation with which the emperor was trying to deal,and he must see for himself, just as if the emperor's situation were hisown, how such a situation might be dealt with; he must see the possiblealternatives, and the reasons for choosing one rather than another; andthus he must go through the process which the emperor went throughin deciding on the particular course. Thus he is re-enacting in his own

History, Memory, and State-Sponsored Violence

mind the experience of the emperor; and only in so far as he does thishas he any historical knowledge, as distinct from a merely philologicalknowledge, of the meaning of the edict. 33

pf course, one could question the value of the entire idea of reenactmentby pointing to its clear limitations in situations where it is applied to events:that do not express a thought and thus do not seem to have an 'inside.'iIn reaction to this criticism, Collingwood, however, answers that the realjobject of history is the 'res gestae,' the realm of human actions, and that allIhuman action involves thought in the broadest sense. Indeed, he states thatI'all history is the history of thought.'34 Collingwood is more worried abouttwo other possible objections to his theory.35 One could argue, on the onehand, that the reenactment of a past thought is impossible by claiming thatin history nothing can happen twice. By referring to an all-encompassinghistorical change or to the 'numerical' difference of different chronologicalpositions, one could argue that the relation between a reenacted thoughtand the original one is merely a relation of resemblance. 'How; one couldask, 'can the historian call the dead to life by scientific research?'36 On theother hand, one could embrace the idea that an experience or thought canbe identically repeated but argue that this reenactment, insofar as the experience is concerned, literally results in the immediate identity between thehistorian and the historical actor he tries to understand. This would effectively mean that the object (the past) would simply be incorporated in thesubject (the historian), so that the resulting knowledge would not be of thepast at all but of the present. This, Collingwood argues, would resembleBenedetto Croce's notorious idea that all history is contemporary history.

The theory of reenactment thus confronts Collingwood with a doubleproblem: On the one hand, he must show that some element of the past cansurvive in order to make plausible his idea of reenactment, and thus denythe absolute absence or distance of the past. However, in order to makeplausible the idea that reenactment can be used to attain knowledge ofthe past, he must draw a clear line between past and present, on the otherhand, and must deny the full presence of that past. Throughout his work,Collingwood develops several arguments in order to steer a middle coursebetween a total absence of the past and its total presence, but on the mostfundamental level, his solution involves no less than a radical rethinking ofthe concepts of time and history themselves.

The easiest way to get a first insight into Collingwood's vision of timeis to focus on a text written in 1926 and given the disarmingly straightforward title 'Some Perplexities About Time: With an Attempted Solution.'37 In this article, Collingwood argues that the 'ordinary' conceptionof time is 'somewhat unstable; and he explicitly rejects the notion of anabstract empty time, the idea of a temporal pointillism, and what he callsthe 'straight line' theory of time. He rejects the tendency of historians to'spatialize' time and fall to the illusion that the past, although not presentto us at the moment, still exists at a distance: This would be to take literally


the fairy tale about the place where all the old moons are kept. We mayregard the past as a necessary pre-condition of the present, Collingwoodasserts, but it has no actual (as opposed to ideal) existence. Still if we recognized only the reality of the present and denied all reality to the past (andthe future), there could be no knowledge at all of the past, and the present,'reduced to a mathematical point; would vanish completely. 'The terms ofour problem, therefore; he writes, 'demand that in some sense we shouldrestore to the past and future their actuality, in order that the present maynot be exhausted of all its content.'38 Collingwood's proposed solution isfound in a complex reasoning that distinguishes 'being' from 'existing,'contrasts 'actual' being with 'ideal' being, and concludes that, 'We do callthe past, as such, into being by recollecting and by thinking historically;but we do this by disentangling it out of the present in which it actuallyexists, transformed, and re-transforming it in thought into what it was.'39

Both the problem and the solution proposed in the article are clearly foreshadowing the 'double problem' of reenactment, and Jan van der Dussenrightly remarks that the reflections on time not only were written shortlybefore Collingwood first started to lecture on the philosophy of history butalso may have triggered some of the discussions in these lectures.4o Still, thePerplexities article is written in a highly abstract language and is an earlytext in which Collingwood's ideas on history are not yet fully mature. Aclearer insight into Collingwood's concept of history can be given by textsof a later date, in which he attempts to define the specificity of the disciplineof history in relation to the natural sciences.

For Hegel, Collingwood writes, the delineation of the proper object of historical knowledge was simple because he still believed that the 'transience ofspecific forms' was an exclusive characteristic of human life, and thus he couldsimply posit that nature has no history.4l However, Collingwood argues, thisview of nature is overthrown by the theory of evolution. The evolutionaryconception of nature, which started in biology and geology, he writes, hasbeen radicalized by philosophers such as Bergson, Alexander, and Whitehead,who take time seriously and posit the 'historicity of things.>l2 The findings ofthe latter philosophers at first seem to abolish the clear divide between naturalprocess and historical process and seem to resolve nature into history. But canthis be true? Is the being of nature indeed a historical being?

No, Collingwood states, Hegel's thesis on the ahistoricity of natureremains, although for other reasons than he imagined, just as true as onthe day it was first posited. What Alexander and Whitehead call historicitycan at best be called 'pseudo-historicity.' The confusion about the allegedhistoricity of nature rests on the misconception that reduces historicity to'change' or 'timefulness.' Real history, however, according to Collingwood,can never be reduced to mere 'temporal sequence' or to the mere successionof events. In contrast to natural processes, in which the past 'dies' whenit is replaced by the present, a part of the past survives into the present inhistorical processes. To put it in Collingwood's somewhat old-fashionedbut nevertheless straightforward philosophical language:


Nature is the realm of change, Spirit is the realm of becoming. The lifeof the spirit is a history: i.e., not a process in which everything comesto be and passes away, but a process in which the past is conserved asan element in the present. The past is not merely a precondition of thepresent but a condition of it. Whereas in nature the past was necessaryin order that the present may now exist (e.g., there must have been anegg that there may now be a hen) the past being thus left behind whenthe present comes into being, in history, so far as this is real history andnot mere time-sequence, the past conserves itself in the present and thepresent could not be there unless it didY

All too often, Collingwood complains, people tal k about history as if itwere the same thing as transience, saying that something is of 'merely historical interest' to express the idea that it has 'passed away.' He admits thathe himself in the past has described history as the narration of 'events thathave finished happening,' but that in reality this is not the case.44 In contrastto the dead past of nature, the historical past is a 'living' or 'surviving' past.In a historical series just like in a natural series, there is chronological succession, but in contrast to the latter there is no 'ceasing to be,' Collingwoodargues. The historical past can survive in the present because it involveshuman thought, and while acts of thought happen at definite times, Collingwood asserts, part of thought stands outside of time. Once something isthought, it tends to become an 'eternal object'-Collingwood borrows thisconcept from Whitehead-which survives through time:

If the discovery of Pythagoras concerning the square on the hypotenuse is a thought which we today can think for ourselves, a thoughtthat constitutes a permanent addition to mathematical knowledge, thediscovery of Augustus, that a monarchy could be grafted upon theRepublican constitution of Rome by developing the implications ofproconsulare imperium and tribunicia potestas, is equally a thoughtwhich the student of Roman history can think for himself, a permanentaddition to political ideas. If Mr. Whitehead is justified in calling theright-angled triangle an eternal object, the same phrase is applicable tothe Roman constitution and the Augustan modification of it.45

It is this survival or even eternity of thought that, according to Collingwood,makes reenactment possible, and without it, he asserts, we could not haveknowledge of the past or insight into the mental world of people living inother times.

However, with this sophisticated reasoning about thought being aneternal object, Collingwood has not yet provided an answer to the secondpotential critique that he himself anticipated: that the eternity of thoughtcollapses the divide between past and present and that a reenacted thoughtthus can only deliver knowledge of the present. Collingwood seeks a solution to this problem by differentiating between what he calls the 'object' of


thought and the 'act' of thought. Several acts of thought, even when separated in time, can have the same (surviving) object of thought, but theseacts of thought always happen in a concrete context and as an organic partof the thinker's life. It is because of this changed context that a reenactmentcan reflexively be recognized as historical. As Collingwood puts it, 'Theanswer is that to re-enact the past in the present is to re-enact it in a contextwhich gives it a new quality.'46 In abstract terms, then, Collingwood's solution to what we above called the double problem of reenactment is situatedin a metaphysical view of historical temporality that he describes as an'eternity in time.' In Collingwood's words:

The eternal, in history, has this peculiarity, that it begins in time. Thehistorical is eternal as in aeternum, not as ex aeterno. Historical beingtriumphs over time in the sense that it becomes eternal: but it becomeseternal not in its actuality (as embodied form), for here, because embodied, it perishes: but in its ideality (as disembodied form).47

Nobody, I presume, will deny that Collingwood's theory of reenactment andthe related notions of eternal objects and a surviving past constitute a quiteradical departure from the notion of the absent past. Nevertheless, there aresome aspects of Collingswood's philosophical reflections that make themless attractive as a basis for theorizing the irrevocable past. First, it can bequestioned whether it actually makes sense to speak about an 'eternity intime.' What can eternity mean if not 'not bound by time' or even 'not intime'? The idea has a mystical ring to it, and it indeed leads Collingwoodto make some rather obscure statements. Take the following example: 'Thecondition of [the past] being thus knowable is that it lives on in ourselves.We can know the Norman Conquest because, being its heirs, we have it inour minds (in our political consciousness) as an integral element.'48

Second, there is the issue of philosophical idealism. Collingwood's reflections on time and history are profoundly embedded in a purebred (neo)idealist philosophy. As Collingwood puts it himself:

the survival of the past in the present, like the existence of secondaryqualities, is something that really happens in the world, but does nothappen except when the world reaches the level of mind in its evolutionary process. Till then, it is a mere virtuality: the past is as it werekilled by a natural death-it dies fighting-it discovers how to triumphover Time and makes itself immortal by becoming Mind or creatingMind as its preserver.49

To be sure, Collingwood's idealism is ingenious: It generally stretches therealm of the ideal only to the spheres of human thought. Still, the connectionto human thought and consciousness makes Collingwood's thinking ratherrestrictive. It is to be doubted whether the phenomenon of the irrevocablecan be properly understood from within this intellectual framework. The


haunting past as we identified it in the cases of Argentina, South Africa,and Sierra Leone can hardly be compared to the categories of thought andknowledge (e.g. a right-angled triangle, the Roman constitution), which Collingwood refers to in order to illustrate his theory of reenactment, and theformer's persistence consequently cannot simply be modeled on the eternityof the latter 'ideal objects.' In general, the claim that 'all history is the historyof thought' only can be maintained if the notion of the historical is strictlydelimited. If we follow Collingwood, we therefore risk ending up with amore exclusive view of historical reality instead of a more inclusive one.Much more can be written about Collingwood's chronosophy-Iet aloneabout his broader philosophy of history whose richness cannot be given itsdue here-but the features just summed up indicate that the theory of reenactment will not likely deliver the alternative chronosophy that we look for.

TWO MARXISTS: ERNST BLOCH AND LOUIS ALTHUSSER

The next two alternative chronosophies that I will discuss are situated inthe field of Marxist social and political analysis. This Marxist presencein our search for alternative notions of historical time should not surprisebecause Marxism has always engaged deeply in the analysis of historicalprocesses and in problems related to the philosophy of history. Althoughthis may sound strange, one of Marxism's most difficult intellectual problems, as Oskar Negt rightly remarks, has been the development of an adequate materialist conception of history: Often Marxist historical analysishas been cast in a Hegelian frame, which treats history as an inflexiblesequence of epochs that replace or 'sublate' each other in a singular andunivocal dialectical process. 50 The chronosophies of Ernst Bloch and LouisAlthusser that I am about to discuss both are the result of a mainly internalcritique aiming to purify Marxism from this Hegelian notion of dialecticsand replace it with a more sophisticated understanding of history. However, because of the close bonds between aspects of Hegelian philosophyand mainstream Western historical thought, Bloch and Althusser's reflections are of direct relevance for both academic historiography and historical thinking in general.

Ernst Bloch

The German-born philosopher Ernst Bloch was a rather singular thinkerwithin the Marxist tradition. Although for most of his long life (18851977) a faithful supporter of Leninism and the Russian Revolution, Blochdeveloped a highly idiosyncratic philosophy and could hardly be called anorthodox Marxist. 51

On the most fundamental level, Bloch's differences with orthodox Marxism revolved around two points: first its philosophy of history, and second


its closely related notion of 'totality.' Although he himself believed in theeventual coming of socialism, Bloch rejected the evolutionarist beliefs oforthodox Marxists who thought that this coming of socialism was guaranteed by a set of stringent historical laws that determine the successionof different historical stages. In addition, Bloch also criticized orthodoxMarxism for holding an impoverished notion of the social whole, in whicheverything was reduced to the singular dimension of economical production. According to Bloch, there were more primal realities than economicsand politics, and he complained that many Marxists left no place for theutopian, the mysterious, or the hidden because they saw reality as a fullyimmanent, homogenous, and concrete totality. 52

These criticisms of evolutionarism and of the reduction of reality toa set of socio-economic essences come together in one of Bloch's mostimportant philosophical concepts: that of Ungleichzeitigkeit, or 'noncontemporaneity.'53 In a more or less implicit form, this notion has returnedthroughout most of Bloch's intellectual career. Already in his first important philosophical work 'The Spirit of Utopia' (published in 1918), the concept was set to work in defense of the utopian energy of art. The true artist,according to Bloch, produces a utopian surplus because (s)he is 'out of season' [unzeitgemass] and in his/her genius transcends the contemporaneitythat commonly unites people. 54 In the middle of the 1920s, the notion ofnon-contemporaneity implicitly figured in a polemic between Bloch and hisfellow Marxist Georg Lubcs. Bloch criticized Lukacs for holding a reductive notion of historical reality and for neglecting the utopian potentialinherent in the 'polyrhythmic' nature of history. 55 Much later, in the 1960s,Bloch drew on the notion of non-contemporaneity to criticize the unilinearand 'time-fetishistic' ideology of progress. 56 His most explicit theoretization of non-contemporaneity, however, is to be found in his book Erbschaftdieser Zeit [Heritage of Our Times], published in Zurich in 1935, in whichhe established an analysis of the rise of German fascism that strongly differed from most orthodox Marxist analyses at the time. 57

Heritage of Our Times, as Anson Rabinbach !"emarks, is organizedaround two heterodox questions: first, could it be true that in a country likeGermany there exist profound social contradictions in addition to the onebetween labor and capital or proletariat and bourgeois?58 And, second, couldit be said that the left has facilitated its own defeat by neglecting these othercontradictions and leaving their anti-capitalist force to the fascists? Blochanswers both questions with a whole-hearted 'yes!' According to him, German society in the 1920s and early 1930s was subject to a multitude of socialcontradictions that constituted a 'dialectically useful "inheritance'" that wasgratefully usurpated by fascism but remained unclaimed by MarxismY

These insights, however, required a major rethinking of the orthodoxMarxist conceptions of time and history. To understand the rise of fascism,it must be recognized that there is such a thing as genuine historical noncontemporaneity. As Bloch claims:


History is no entity advancing along a single line, in which capitalismfor instance, as the final stage, has resolved all the previous ones; but itis a polyrhythmic and multi-spatial entity, with enough unmastered andas yet by no means revealed and resolved corners. Today not even theeconomic substructures in these corners, i.e., the obsolete forms of production and exchange, have passed away, let alone their ideological superstructures, let alone the genuine contents of not yet defined Irratio.6o

In line with this thesis, Bloch states that, 'Not all people exist in the sameNow. They do so only externally, through the fact that they can be seentoday. But they are thereby not yet living at the same time with others.'61Depending on where one is situated and depending on what class onebelongs to, people can live in different times: 'Older times than the modernones continue to have an effect in older strata [... ] Various years in generalbeat in the one which is just being counted and prevails.'62

Bloch reports the existence of at least three large non-contemporaneousgroups in interbellum Germany, all attracted to the extreme right. Firstthere is the youth, whose 'hollow being-young' is not entirely present.Bloch admits that there is no youth as such, and that it differs from class toclass and period to period, but he claims that youngsters in their longing toescape the reified present often are more attracted to the reactionary rightthan to the progressive left: 'Youth which is not in step with the barrenNow more easily goes back than passes through the today in order to reachthe tomorrow.'63 Another non-contemporaneous group is that of the peasantry, which still lives and acts almost exactly like their ancestors did centuries ago. 'Economically and ideologically,' Bloch writes, 'the peasants,in the midst of the nimble capitalist century, have an older position.'64 Aslong as the time difference between the city and the country is not effaced,Bloch claims, this group too will not associate itself with the workersand primarily will be attracted to the 'romantic' right. The third noncontemporaneous group is that of the impoverished middle class, whichis nostalgic about the pre-war period when it was better off. The strangerevolutionary nostalgia of this insecure group, Bloch complains, 'placesfigures in the midst of the city which have not been seen for centuries,' andonce again, he asserts, this non-contemporaneity draws toward fascism.As he describes this tragic process:

Older sorts of being thus recur precisely in urban terms, an older wayof thinking and older images of hate as well, like that of Jewish usuryas exploitation per se. The breaking of 'feudal tenancy' is believedin as if the economy were at around the year 1500, superstructureswhich seemed revolutionized long ago come revolving back again andcome to a standstill in today's world as whole medieval townscapes.Here is the Tavern of Nordic Blood, there the castle of the Hitlerduke, there the Church of the German Reich, an earthy Church in


which even city folk feel themselves to be a fruit of the German soiland worship the soil as holy, as a Confession of German heroes andGerman history.65

Although some of the features described above could be called mere backwardness or false non-contemporaneity, Bloch argues that attention mustbe paid to real, genuine non-contemporaneity. To understand why noncontemporaneity can be so politically explosive, it must be understoodthat there are in fact two kinds of non-contemporaneity: an objective anda subjective one. Objective non-contemporaneity refers to the remnants ofearlier, pre-capitalist, times, or sub- and superstructures that survive inthe present. Subjective non-contemporaneity, in contrast, refers to a 'nondesire for the Now' that, after having existed for a long time as mereembitterment, can turn into an accumulated rage. This subjective rage isespecially dangerous if it meets or activates objectively non-contemporaneous contradictions. Instead of misinterpreting fascism as a mere superstructural expression of the last and moribund stage of monopoly capitalism,Bloch therefore launches an urgent call to pay attention to non-contemporaneous contradictions and mobilize them against capitalism and fascism:'The task is to release those elements even of the non-contemporaneouscontradiction which are capable of aversion and transformation, namelythose hostile to capitalism, homeless in it, and to remount them for functioning in a different connection.'66 The proletariat has to form a 'triplealliance' with the impoverished peasants and the impoverished middleclasses-both under proletarian hegemony of course. In order for the noncontemporaneous contradictions to be mastered and a triple alliance to beformed, however, the often simplistic Marxist notion of dialectics has tobe replaced by a more complex notion of a multi-layered or polyrhythmicdialectics that recognizes the fact that previous historical stages are nevercompletely 'resolved' in more recent ones and that aspects of the past cansurvive into the present.

Louis Althusser

It would be hard to think of any Marxist intellectual who was more opposite to Ernst Bloch in style and thought than the Algerian-born French philosopher Louis Althusser (1918-1990). However, just like Bloch, Althussercriticized simplistic notions of dialectics and reductionist notions of socialtotality, which he similarly related to notions of time. Hegel's concepts ofdialectics and time are the main object of Althusser's critique.

All too often, Althusser complains, it is thought that Marxism resultedfrom an inversion of Hegelianism, that Hegel's idealism so to speak placedreality on its head, and that Marx's materialism placed it on its feetagain. This ambiguous idea of 'inverting Hegel,' according to Althusser,is problematic, particularly if it is applied to the notion of dialectics. In


fact, Althusser asserts, a genuinely Marxist notion of dialectics, more thanmerely inverting Hegel's dialectic, is radically different in natureY

From Marxist revolutionary experience, Althusser writes, it is knownthat one cannot speak about a single, general social 'contradiction.'Instead, a vast accumulation of heterogeneous social contradictions cometo play 'in the same court' in all societies. For Althusser, Marxist analysis therefore shows that the history of social formations is principally'overdetermined.'68 Hegelian dialectic, in contrast, does not include such anotion of overdetermination and works with a simple concept of contradiction. According to Althusser, this contradiction can take its simple shapeonly because it is based on Hegel's even more simplistic thoughts aboutthe essential unity of historical periods. Hegel, he complains, reduces theinfinite diversity of historical societies by positing the existence of simplespiritual unity or totality.69

Just like Bloch, Althusser turns his critique of the simplistic and 'un-Marxist' notions of dialectics and totality into a critique of historical time. Onceagain Hegel is the main object of critique. Hegelian time has two essential characteristics: its 'homogeneous continuity' and its 'contemporaneity,'which underlies the notion of a historical presenCo The second aspect ismost fundamental and functions as a condition of possibility for the firstone. The notion of the contemporaneity of time, according to Althusser,is rooted in a 'metaphysical freezing' of the temporal continuum. Thisintellectual operation, where one makes a vertical incision at a momentin time to reveal a historical present, he calls an 'essential section' [couped'essence]. Althusser argues that this essential section is only thinkable incombination with a particular conception of social totality-one 'in whichall the elements of the whole are given in a co-presence'-and that as such itis highly ideological.71 The ideological character of Hegel's concept of timeworries Althusser mostly because Hegel borrowed it from a 'vulgar empiricism' that still underlies the work of most historians and social scientists.One of the clearest manifestations of this problematic conception of history, Althusser claims, can be found in the widespread distinction betweenthe 'synchronic' and the 'diachronic.'

Because a truly Marxist conception of social totality should not be confused with the Hegelian idea of a unified 'spiritual' whole, so too, accordingto Althusser, a Marxist notion of historical time should be distinguishedfrom a Hegelian one.72 In line with the phenomenon of overdetermination,Marxist totality is a complex 'structured whole,' which is made up of 'relatively autonomous levels' and which cannot be reduced to the primacy of acentre. This has significant theoretical consequences. Most important, theexistence of this structured totality can no longer be grasped with the commonsensical notions of a historical present or contemporaneity. In fact,Althusser radically breaks with the notion of a singular continuous andhomogenous time and instead posits a plurality of times:


It is no longer possible to think the process of the development of thedifferent levels of the whole in the same historical time. Each of thesedifferent 'levels' does not have the same type of historical existence. Onthe contrary, we have to assign to each level a peculiar time, relativelyautonomous and hence relatively independent, even in its dependence,of the 'times' of other levels. We can and must say: for each mode ofproduction there is a peculiar time and history, punctuated in a specificway by the development of the productive forces; the relations of production have their peculiar time and history, punctuated in a specificway; the political superstructure has its own history ... ; philosophyhas its own time and history ... ; aesthetic productions have their owntime and history ... ; scientific formations have their own time andhistory, etc.73

With this rejection of historical contemporaneity, the synchrony/diachronyopposition, of course, dissolves as well. Something of this oppositionremains, to be sure, insofar as it is understood to be the reflection of a mere'epistemological operation' that attempts to think the complex articulationof different temporalities. Yet, the notion of synchrony should not be confused with the temporal or historical presence of a real object.74 Because thenotion of diachrony is built on the notion of synchrony, similar conclusionsmust be reached:

Diachrony is reduced to the sequence of events (a I'evenementiel), andto the effects of this sequence of events on the structure of the synchronic. [... ] Once synchrony has been correctly located, diachronyloses its 'concrete' sense and nothing is left of it either but its epistemological use, on condition that it undergoes a theoretical conversionand is considered in its true sense as a category not of the concrete butof knowing.75

After the rejection of the contemporaneity and homogenous continuity oftime, and after the dissol ution of the synchrony/diachrony opposition, it needsto be concluded, Althusser argues, that one cannot speak of a singular History but instead must speak of an irreducible series of histories or 'structuresof historicity.'76 Here then we are confronted with a chronosophy that breakswith the past/present dichotomy and seems to enable us to think about thepersistence of the past into the present. That is clearly how Althusser himself thinks about his critique. Marxist political practice, he argues, is oftenconfronted with the survival of the past: 'There can be no doubt that thesesurvivals exist-they cling tenaciously to life. m Although the term survivalis often used, the phenomenon itself, Althusser complains, remains virtuallyuninvestigated. The phenomenon deserves better than its conceptual fate inHegelianism, where it is treated as mere 'supersession'-the 'maintenanceof-what-has-been-negated-in-its-very-negation.' According to Althusser, one


look suffices to see that the survival of the 'superseded' (aufgehoben) past inHegel is reduced to a simple modality of memory and that as such it is a 'predigested' past that never really forms an obstacle or a threat.

Marx's notion of supersession, Althusser argues, clearly was differentfrom that held by Hegel because 'his past was no shade, not even an "objective" shade-it is a terribly positive and active structured reality, just ascold, hunger and the night are for his poor worker.'78 The reality of survival,according to Althusser, again has to be related to overdetermination, whichexplains that a revolution in the structure of a society does not immediatelymodify the existing superstructures of that society or that revolutions mayeven ensure survivals or the reactivation of 'older elements.' As he remarksin a poetic mood: In history, superstructures 'are never seen to step respectfully aside when their work is done or, when the Time comes [ ... ] to scatter before His Majesty the Economy as he strides along the royal road ofthe Dialectic.'79 In fact, he argues, the entire logic of supersession has to begiven up if one wants to understand the phenomenon of survival, but eventhen, he admits, a lot of theoretical work remains to be done.

When it comes to his theoretical critique, Althusser proves to be wellaware of most of the potential pitfalls that stopped some of his predecessorsin their tracks. Once one has rejected the ideological model of a continuous time that can be dissected into contemporaneous historical presents,he explains, it is important not to substitute it for another ideological time.Therefore, one has to resist the temptation to relate the plurality of different times to a single ideological 'base time' or to install a kind of 'referencetime' against which the dislocation of other times is then measured. This isexactly what, according to Althusser, went wrong with the chronosophicreflections of some of the Annales historians-Lucien Febvre, ErnestLabrousse, and most notably Fernand Braudel. They correctly observedthat there are different times in history, but they were 'tempted to relatethese varieties, as so many variants measurable by their duration, to ordinary time itself, to the ideological time continuum we have discussed.'80 Ifthis ideological reference time is reintroduced, it will soon become irresistible to treat the dislocation of different times as forms of backwardness orforwardness in time.

Regrettably, Althusser's own philosophy is not without ambiguities onthis very issue. Despite his stress on overdetermination and the pluralityof times, Althusser claims that these times are only 'relatively' autonomousafter all, and that their coexistence is fixed in the 'last instance' by the'level' or 'instance' of the economy.81 Martin Jay explains this strange philosophical move as an attempt to head off charges of non-Marxist pluralismthat might otherwise result from his theory of overdetermination.82 Buteven despite the fact that he adds the qualification that 'the lonely hourof the "last instance" never comes,'83 Althusser's relapse into economicdeterminism raises serious questions about his theory of differential time.


If, despite its 'structured complexity,' there is such a thing as a center oressence to the social whole after all, the reintroduction of an (economistic) 'base time' or 'reference time' cannot be fenced off. To be sure, thereintroduction of such an economistic reference time does not necessarilyrender Althusser's chronosophy inconsistent because it cannot be equatedwith Hegelian ideological time as a homogenous series of contemporaneouspresents. Nevertheless, it is hard to see how one could keep this referencetime from measuring all temporal dislocations in terms of forwardness orbackwardness-and thus from becoming allochronistic?

The same problem arises in an even higher degree in the chronosophy ofErnst Bloch, on which, for explanatory reasons, I postponed my critique.Bloch, too, despite all his rhetoric about a multilayered and polyrhythmicdialectics, cannot resist the reductionist seduction. Despite his recognition that a plurality of weighty social antagonisms can function alongsidethe one between proletarians and bourgeois, the weight of the former, forBloch, can never equal that of the latter. 84 The remnants of reductionistpolitical ontology are clearly reflected in Bloch's chronosophy, which, weshould now mention, also includes, except for the objective and subjective non-contemporaneous, the categories of the objective and subjectivecontemporaneous. Non-contemporaneous contradictions have a utopianand revolutionary force, Bloch writes, 'but the subjectively non-contemporaneous contradiction would never be so sharp, nor the objectively noncontemporaneous one so visible, if an objectively contemporaneous one didnot exist, namely that posited and growing in and with modern capitalismitself.'85 On the basis of this notion of the objectively contemporaneous,Bloch is able to claim that communist language 'is in fact totally contemporaneous and precisely orientated to the most advanced economy.'86 Despitethe positive views of the non-contemporaneous that Bloch initially held,and despite his warnings not to confuse the non-contemporaneous withmere backwardness, it is hard to ignore the fact that this idea of backwardness is the main association in the 'last instance.'87

Bloch's chronosophical reflections indeed are remembered primarily inthe form of the short and paradoxical expression stating the 'non-contemporaneity of the contemporaneous' [Ungleichzeitigkeit des Gleichzeitigen],an expression that begs the questions of which of the two terms should bestressed and how they can ever exist alongside each other. Here it might begood to stop for a moment and take a look at an important critique andwarning that the anthropologist Johannes Fabian has expressed about thenotion of a non-contemporaneity of the contemporaneous or, in his words,a 'denial of coevalness.' In his groundbreaking book Time and the Other,Fabian convincingly demonstrates how anthropology uses a politics of timeto constitute its object of research-the other. 88 According to him, time inanthropological discourse almost invariably has been used to separate theobserver from the observed. In anthropology, he writes, there is 'a persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology


in a Time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse.'89 The use of a series of temporal 'distancing devices' produces anegative global result because it tends to represent the spatial distributionof humanity as an evolutionary sequence in time so that all cultures that donot belong to the West come to be seen as archaic or 'behind' in time. 'Inshort,' he writes, 'geopolitics has its ideological foundations in chronopolitics.' Although Fabian recognizes the potentially emancipatory dimensionsof the appropriation of different times, he thus primarily stresses that thedenial of coevalness can function as a condition of domination. Moreover,he claims that the 'allochronistic' capacity of anthropological discourse isdirectly related to its origin in a seemingly 'neutral' intellectual construction of naturalized and spatialized time.

Fabian's critique serves as a weighty warning against any unconditionalacceptance of, or too great an enthusiasm for, the notions of non-contemporaneity or differential time. Still, much of the potentially negativepolitical and ethical effects of the idea of non-contemporaneity can be neutralized if this idea is embraced and if its intellectual consequences are consistently taken to their conclusion. In reaction to Fabian, one could arguethat instead of denying the real non-contemporaneity between the Westand the non-West, the supposed contemporaneity of the West with itselfhas to be questioned and criticized. Althusser is right when he remarks thatdifferences in temporality cannot be thought of in terms of backwardnessor forwardness if there is no ideological reference time or base time. Whatwe need and what is mostly lacking in the alternative chronosophies discussed in this chapter, therefore, is an explicit deconstruction of any notionof a time that acts as a container time and pretends to be the measure of allother times. Who can we better turn to for this type of deconstruction jobthan the French philosopher Jacques Derrida?

7 Spectral TimesJacques Derrida and theDeconstruction of Time

INTRODUCTION

In a contribution to a book titled Post-structuralism and the Questionof History, Geoff Bennington writes that 'it would not be difficult toconstruct an argument showing that deconstruction insofar as it insistson the necessary non-coincidence of the present with itself, is in fact insome senses the most historical of discourses imaginable." This claimmay sound strange to many historians. Deconstruction often has beencriticized as anti-historical, and its effects have been widely feared as amajor threat to the integrity of the historical discipline. In Richard J.Evans' well-known In Defense of History, for example, Jacques Derrida,along with some others, prominently figures as one of the villains andarch-deceivers who are out on a mission to destroy history.2 Of course,Derrida's deconstruction does challenge some deeply embedded presuppositions of academic historiography, and Derrida has always been clearabout his criticism of certain metaphysical aspects ingrained in history.3Nevertheless, Bennington's claim makes sense, and in this chapter I willargue that Derrida's work can be an important source of inspiration for amore inclusive historical discourse that is capable of addressing the problem of the irrevocable and that does not tend toward allochronism. Derrida often stresses his interest in history, and especially in his later workhe discusses a series of topics (including those of memory, inheritance,mourning, and spectrality) that are of great interest to historians.4 In thischapter, I will mainly focus on Derrida's relatively late work, Speeters ofMarx. The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (published in 1994), which has as its main theme 'the persistenceof a present past or the return of the dead which the worldwide work ofmourning cannot get rid of.'5 In addition, I will relate this theme of thehaunting past-or in Derrida's words 'spectral' past-to the reflectionson (historical) time that can already be found in some of Derrida's earliestwork, including 'Speech and Phenomena,' 'Of Grammatology,' and theessays 'Differance' and 'Ousia and Gramme.'


SPECTERS OF MARX

Specters of Marx takes a special place in the oeuvre of Derrida. Manycommentators have interpreted this book as a turning point in Derrida'swork, characterizing the start of a 'later' intellectual phase in which Derrida increasingly explicitly addressed ethical and political issues. In addition to that, Specters of Marx embodies a long-expected discussion on therelationship between deconstruction and Marxism, a topic that Derridahad promised to elaborate on more than two decades earlier.6 The bookresulted from two lectures that Derrida gave on the occasion of a congresstitled 'Whither Marxism?' that was organized at the University of California at Riverside in April 1993 and raised the question of the political fateof Marxism at the end of the twentieth century. Derrida's discussion of theMarxist legacy did not remain unnoticed in Marxist and radical left-wingcircles. Besides hostile reactions, which were to be expected, the puhlicationof Specters of Marx provoked a profound intellectual debate and promptedthe publication of a series of wide-ranging comments by prominent thinkers. The book, however, covers a much broader range of topics rather thanfocusing exclusively on the subject of Marxism. Instead of merely narratingabout the specters of Marx, Derrida reflects on a whole series of specters,and the easiest way to organize a discussion of the complex contents of thebook, it seems to me, is by focusing on some of these different specters.

Let us start with a short discussion of the specters that Derrida sayshe first thought of when choosing the title Specters of Marx: the spectersof Marx and Marxism that, according to Derrida, today still-more thanever-haunt international politics despite the attempted exorcisms stagedby neo-liberalism. Derrida denounces the flush of victory that took over theWest after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the implosion of the EasternBlock. He strongly criticizes the installment of a worldwide neo-capitalisthegemony and the new 'dogmatics' that came with it. About the dominantneo-liberal discourse and its 'anti-Marxist conjuration; he writes that it:

often has the manic, jubilatory, and incantatory form that Freud assigned to the so-called triumphant phase of mourning work. The incantation repeats and ritualizes itself, it holds forth and holds to formulas,like any animistic magic. To the rhythm of a cadenced march, it proclaims: Marx is dead, communism is dead, very dead, and along withit its hopes, its discourse, its theories, and its practices. It says: long livecapitalism, long live the market, here's to the survival of economic andpoliticalliberalismF

Derrida focuses especially on the discourse of the political philosopherFrancis Fukuyama, whose work, The End of History and the Last Man,he critically rejects as an anti-Marxist neo-evangelistic 'gospel' that lacks arOlnvinrinu theory of historical events. 8

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In reaction to the messianistic rhetoric about the victory of liberaldemocracy and the end of history, Derrida cries out that, 'never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affectedas many human beings in the history of the earth and of humanity.'9 Weget to read an exceptionally straightforward political Derrida, who permitshimself to name the 'plagues of the new world order' in what he calls a 'tenword telegram.' Among other things, he lists the unemployment caused bythe deregulation of new markets, the massive exclusion of homeless citizensand exiles from democratic life, the inability to master the contradictionsof the free market, the aggravation of foreign debts, the arms industry andtrade, the spread of nuclear weapons, and the increase in inter-ethnic wars.In this context, Derrida argues, Marx's heritage at the end of the twentiethcentury remains as important as it ever was despite the collapse of communism in the Eastern bloc. Provided that one takes into account their'irreducihle historicity; he claims, few texts in the philosophical t:adition,perhaps even none, contain lessons that are more important today than theones of the 'Manifesto' and some of the other great works of Marx.

Despite the repeated declarations of the death of Marxism and communism, neo-liberalism has not succeeded in exorcising all of Marx's ghosts.In fact, Derrida claims, the painstaking repression of Marx's ghosts by thehegemonic powers only confirms the phenomenon of haunting: 'Hauntingbelongs to the structure of every hegemony.'1O Far from being dead and gone,the specter of communism, today as a revenant, still haunts the dominantpowers as effectively as it did in the middle of the nineteenth century, whenit was still to come, merely announced by name in the first sentence of the'Manifesto': 'A specter is haunting Europe-the specter of communism.'

This brings us to the second group of specters on which Derrida focuses:those that roam Marx's writings and, from time to time, come to hauntMarx himself. Throughout his entire oeuvre, Marx had a great fondness forspectral language, and in an original textual interpretation, Derrida showshis readers that it is impossible to understand the many facets of Marx'sthought without reflecting on the philosophical function of this language.Besides das Gespenst des Kommunismus featured in the 'Manifesto; specters already appeared in Marx's 1841 dissertation, 'The Difference in thePhilosophy of Nature of Democritus and Epicurus,' only to reappear in muchlarger crowds in 'German Ideology' and 'The Eighteenth Brumaire of LouisBonaparte.'!! In the latter work, Derrida demonstrates, Marx never stopsconjuring and exorcising because he needs the ghostly figure in order to sortout the complex issue of revolutionary inheritance-the tendency of revolutions to follow the example of, and refer back to, older revolutions-bydistinguishing between the productive spirit [Geist] of the revolution and itsanachronistic and undesirable specter [Gespenst]. The most ingenious elaboration on spectrality, however, according to Derrida, is to be found in 'Capital' and more specifically in the passages where Marx describes the becomingfetish of commodities. Can it be called a coincidence that Marx there tries to


explain the mystical character of the commodity by describing it as an apparition? After offering a detailed reading of Marx's famous example about thecommodification of a worn down wooden table-which, once placed in anantique shop, is metamorphosed into a kind of supernatural thing or a sensuous non-sensuous thing, with a market value that cannot be reduced to anyuse value-Derrida resolutely concludes that:

The ghostly schema now appears indispensible. The commodity is a'thing' without phenomenon, a thing in flight that surpasses the senses(it is invisible, intangible, inaudible, odorless); but this transcendenceis not altogether spiritual, it retains that bodiless body which we haverecognized as making the difference between specter and spirit. Whatsurpasses the senses still passes before us in the silhouette of the sensuous body that it nevertheless lacks or that remains inaccessible to us.12

However, Derrida warns, despite the importance of the figure of the specter in his philosophical, economical, and political analyses, Marx dislikesghosts as much as his adversaries who try to exorcise the specter of communism. Although Marx is obsessed by ghosts, he does not want to believein them and tries to oppose their deceptive appearances to real presenceand actual reality. One day, Marx believes, humanity will be able to getrid of the delirium of ghosts because these, according to him, are bound tothe structure of bourgeois economy. Concerning the issue of revolutionaryinheritance, Marx eventually comes to reject both the spirit and the specterof past revolutions. He famously states that revolutions of the nineteenthcentury have to draw their inspiration from the future instead of the past:'Let the dead bury their dead.' Yet, after repeatedly having conjured themup in his writings, Marx cannot get rid of his specters that easily becausehe is haunted by them. As Derrida argues:

He believes he can oppose them, like life to death, like vain appearances of the simulacrum to real presence. He believes enough in thedividing line of this opposition to want to denounce, chase away, orexorcise the specters but by means of critical analysis and not by somecounter-magic. But how to distinguish between the analysis that denounces magic and the counter-magic that it still risks being?13

In conclusion, Derrida argues, Marx, much like his adversaries, tries toexorcise spectrality by grounding his critique in an ontology. Although histhought is critical, Derrida claims, it nevertheless remains 'predeconstructive' and caught up in the web of metaphysics.14

This being said, we can focus on the third group of specters that in amore complex and often implicit way populate Specters ofMarx: those that,on the one hand, haunt Derrida and his deconstruction and, on the otherhand, help deconstruction to haunt the metaphysical heritage of Western

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philosophy. As mentioned above, Specters ofMarx at the time of its appearance, was fairly atypical in Derrida's oeuvre because of the straightforwardpolitical and ethical statements it contains. Although Derrida always madeit clear that he considered himself to be a left-wing thinker, he was oftenurged by colleagues on the left to take more explicit political stances, and hiswork frequently has been criticized for its alleged ethical and political relativism, irresponsibility, or even (indirect) support of positions belonging tothe political right. 1s In this context, it can be argued that Specters of Marx ispart of an attempt to deal with the ethical and political questions that hauntdeconstruction. This becomes clear when we consider that Derrida declaresabout his acceptance to speak on the 'Whither Marxism?' conference that itwas 'not in the first place in order to propose a scholarly, philosophical discourse. It is first of all so as not to flee from a responsibility.'16 This responsibility, he argues, is partly that of an heir toward an inheritance-a relationthat, according to him, is always characterized partly by the (critical andselective) affirmation of a debt. l ? In a bold statement, Derrida declares thatdeconstruction in his opinion never had 'any sense of interest' except as aninheritance and radicalization of a certain spirit of Marxism. An inheritancebecause 'deconstruction would have been impossible and unthinkable in apre-Marxist space.'18 A radicalization because deconstruction, in contrast toMarxism, does take spectrality seriously, does not consider it a mere simulacrum that should be opposed to 'real presence,' and does not violently tryto integrate it into an ontology.19

Scholars in general, Derrida argues, have rarely addressed the problemof spectrality because of its uncanny and 'undecidable' characteristics thatresist the sharp distinction between the real and the unreal, the living andthe dead, or-most importantly-between what is present and what isabsent (what is present and what is past).20 Still, precisely when no ethics orpolitics seems possible, thinkable, and just without respect for or recognition of those who are not presently living (whether already dead or not yetborn), it is more necessary than ever, Derrida claims, 'to speak of the ghost,indeed to the ghost and with it.'21 Derrida is clear about why he addresses thefigure of the specter: 'If I am getting ready to speak at length about ghosts,inheritance, and generations, generations of ghosts, which is to say aboutcertain others who are not present, nor presently living, either to us, in us,or outside us, it is in the name of justice.'22 However, he warns, addressingthe spectral is not an easy assignment because as a non-being that is neverfully present, it is 'outside of any synchrony' and therefore defies semantics and ontology as well as psychoanalysis and philosophy.23 Indeed-andhere we finally arrive at the subject of chronosophy-the spectral cannotbe contemplated as long as one relies on the modern concept of time as aseries of successive 'presents' or 'nows' that are identical and contemporarywith themselves. Inspired by Hamlet's famous declamation that the time is'out of joint,' Derrida argues that spectrality only can be understood if oneaccepts the 'non-contemporaneity with itself of the living present.'24


Although I have repeatedly stressed that Specters of Marx representsa change in Derrida's work-separating the more outright political 'laterDerrida' from an 'earlier Derrida'-the remarks about the necessary relation between the specter and the 'disjointed' nature of time only can beunderstood thoroughly if they are situated within Derrida's overarchinglife project of criticizing the Western 'metaphysics of presence.' Therefore, Ipropose that we turn to Derrida's earlier work for a moment and focus onthe deconstruction of time that was elaborated there.

DECONSTRUCTION AND THEMETAPHYSICS OF PRESENCE

For at least two and a half millennia, Derrida claims, the tradition of Western thought has been grounded in, and organized around, the fundamentalmetaphysical presupposition of 'presence'-whether this is defined as theproximity of (material or ideal) objects, as the self-presence or the selfidentity of a subject/cogito in the immediacy of its own mental acts, as theco-presence of self and other in intersubjectivity, or, on the most fundamental level, as the maintenance of the point-like 'now' of the temporal presentitself. IS In his early work, Derrida never stops criticizing the many different forms of this metaphysics of presence. In what follows, I will brieflyfocus on three different but connected 'levels' on which Derrida attacksthe notion of presence: first that of the theory of signs and signification,second his critical reflections on Husserl's phenomenology of internal timeconsciousness, and third that of the 'fundamental' ontology of time as itwas studied by Heidegger.

According to Derrida, the concept of the sign in the Western traditionhas always stood for the representation of presence or has been integratedin a system (language or thought) that is striving for presence. To be freedfrom this grip of metaphysics, it has to be radically rethought.16 The linguist Ferdinand de Saussure took some decisive steps in the direction ofsuch a rethinking when he stated the arbitrary and differential characterof the sign: i.e. the fact that the relation between signifier and signified ismerely arbitrary instead of being necessary or natural, and the fact that elements of signification only function by grace of a system of differences andoppositions that distinguish them. De Saussure's claim that in linguisticsignification there are only differences is groundbreaking, but, accordingto Derrida, it does not go far enough. First, de Saussure's notion of linguistic difference has to be extended in order to include not only oppositionsbetween terms that are synchronic, but also non-synchronic differentialrelations between (absent) past or future elements. As Derrida puts it:

the movement of signification is possible only if each so-called 'present'element, each element appearing on the scene of presence, is related to

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something other than itself, thereby keeping within itself the mark ofthe past element, and already letting itself be vitiated by the mark of itsrelation to the future e1ement. 17

From this finding about the necessary dimension of absence or non-presence in the constitution of the sign, a radical conclusion must be drawn:Linguistic meaning can never be fixed or be fully present as such, and thereis no such thing as an absolute or 'transcendental' signified; significationinstead is caught up in a systematic play in which every concept refers toanother and in which meaning is endlessly differing and infinitely deferred.This semiotic play, which ties together the dimensions of difference anddeferral, is what Derrida calls differance. Moreover, Derrida claims, deSaussure's principle about the constitutive nature of semiotic differencenot only has to be radicalized in such a way that it comes to include nonsynchronic elements, it also has to be extended to all systems of referralrather than being limited to language in the strict sense. De Saussure, justlike many other thinkers, remains caught up in metaphysics because heprimarily ascribes the dimensions of difference and absence to written language, which is then contrasted with, and subordinated to, 'full' speech orthe self-present voice, which because of its alleged proximity to the mindwould escape the effect of differance. As Derrida demonstrates, this privileging of speech and the debasement of writing as a mere supplement tothe spoken word-which he terms phonocentrism-is in its turn based onthe privileging of presence. He points out that the perceived secondary status of writing directly correlates to its determination as 'translator of afull speech that was fully present (present to itself, to its signified, to theother, the very condition of the theme of presence in general), technics inthe service of language, spokesman, interpreter of an originary speech itselfshielded from interpretation.'18 However, by means of a fairly complex andingenious analysis (which cannot be reproduced here), Derrida shows thatspoken messages are subject to the play of dif(erance at least as much aswritten texts, and that speech therefore has to be considered a subspeciesof 'writing' in the broadest sense, rather than existing prior to it-hence hisfamous 'grammatology,' the science of writing.

Of course, Derrida asserts, one could be tempted to object that behindspeech there is a living subject whose intuitive consciousness can graspmeaning without any need for signs or signification and can thus put an endto the infinite play of differance,I9 This idea of the immediate and self-present intuition of consciousness is at the basis of almost all Western theoriesof signification. According to Derrida, it can, for example, be consideredthe 'principle of principles' that grounds the philosophical project of phenomenology that was founded by Edmond Husserl at the beginning of thetwentieth century. However, Derrida argues, this privileging of consciousness, too, can be traced back to a privileging of presence: in this case, the


privileging of the temporal present as an absolutely synchronic, point-likeinstant. Husserl's entire theory of signification, for example, is based on thepresumption of the existence of a 'solitary mental life' that has no need forsigns or inward communication because its 'mental acts' are 'lived by us inthe same instant' rim selben Augenblick], and that instant is considered asindivisible as a 'blink of an eye.' To cite Derrida:

The force of this demonstration presupposes the instant as a point, theidentity of experience instantaneously present to itself. Self-presencemust be produced in the undivided unity of a temporal present so as tohave nothing to reveal to itself by the agency of signs. Such a perception or intuition of self by self in presence would not only be the casewhere 'signification' in general could not occur, but also would assurethe general possibility of a primordial perception or intuition, i.e., ofnonsignification as the 'principle of principles.'30

Put differently, Husserl's theory of signification, along with that of so manyother Western thinkers, collapses if it can be shown that this particularconcept of the 'now' is untenable, 'if the punctuality of the instant is amyth, a spatial or mechanical metaphor, an inherited metaphysical concept, or all at once, and if the present of self-presence is not simple, if itis constituted in a primordial and irreducible synthesis.'31 The latter is, ofcourse, what Derrida sets out to demonstrate, and ironically-but not surprisingly given what one commentator pointedly called Derrida's 'parasitic'style of philosophizing32-he does so by means of a detailed reading of thereflections on time that can be found in Husserl's work itself. Despite hisimplicit and probably unconscious use of the metaphor of the punctualnow in his theory of consciousness and signification, Husserl, in his work'The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness,' himself refutes theidea of the simple self-identity of the present. In the latter work, Husserlfamously demonstrated that human perception of temporal phenomena cannever be reduced to a purely present or 'presentative' perception (intention)but always includes a dimension of short-term memory (or retention) anda dimension of anticipation (or protention). That we can perceive a seriesof discrete tones as a musical melody, for example, is due to the fact thatour brain along with the tone played retains the sound of previous tonesand anticipates the sound of the tones coming. In order to limit the radicalimplications of these findings about the composite nature of perception,Husserl stresses that retention is a form of primary memory in which a veryrecent past is retained for a very short amount of time, and that it shouldnot be confused with the less trustworthy secondary memory, in which thepast is not retained but reproduced or re-presented in the form of activerecollection. Derrida, however, shows that this divide between the quasiperception of primary memory and the re-presentational character of secondary memory is arbitrary and indefensible. Instead, he claims, Husserl's

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findings about internal time consciousness should be taken to their radical conclusions: that there is no such a thing as (pure, synchronic) perception; or, put differently, that so-called presentative perception is alwaysalready mediated by memories and expectations that do not refer to thepresent, that all presentation is first of all re-presentation. To cite the wordsof Derrida:

One then sees quickly that the presence of the perceived present canappear as such only inasmuch as it is continuously compounded witha nonpresence and nonperception, with primary memory and expectation (retention and protention). These nonperceptions are neitheradded to, nor do they occasionally accompany, the actual perceivednow; they are essentially and indispensably involved in its possibility.[... ] As soon as we admit this continuity of the now and the not-now,perception and nonperception, in the zone of primordiality commonto primordial impression and primordial retention, we admit the otherinto the self-identity of the Augenblick; nonpresence and nonevidenceare admitted into the blink of the instant. 33

Of course, one could object that Derrida, as is apparent in the terminology of the above passage, only deconstructs internal time consciousnessor the perceived present, and that behind this subjective time there stillexists an unshakable objective time that flows equably from instant toinstant independent from any perceiving subject. However, in addition tohis deconstruction of so-called 'subjective' time, Derrida also attacks themetaphysical tradition that describes and conceptualizes time in objectivistic or ontological terms. 34 The history of Western thought, according toDerrida, has been strongly influenced by a conception of time that putstoo much emphasis on the present and the actual to the disadvantage ofthe absent (non-present) and the inactual. Derrida repeats and radicalizesa critique that Martin Heidegger already hinted at: Borrowing the latter'sterminology, he claims that the reduction of all forms of Being to forms of'presence' (Anwesenheit) is in its turn related to the privileging of a definitemode of time-the present (Gegenwart).35 From Parmenides to Husserl,Derrida writes, the privilege of the present has never been profoundly questioned. Even non-presence is always considered in relation to presence oras a modalization of presence. The past and the future too are often determined as a succession of past presents or future presents.

A particular determination of time has thus implicitly governed the determination of the meaning of Being throughout the history of philosophy.'Traditional ontology,' according to Derrida, can therefore 'be destroyedonly by repeating and interrogating its relation to the problem of time.'36Heidegger clearly sensed this but, according to Derrida, refused or did notdare to elaborate on the 'temporal clue' that could destroy all metaphysics. While 'Sein und Zeit' subjects classical ontology to an 'extraordinary


trembling' by radically criticizing 'vulgar' linear time, its own propositionof a more 'authentic' primordial time, according to Derrida, 'still remainswithin the grammar and lexicon of metaphysics.'37 At one point, Derridaeven considers the Heideggerian problematic to be the 'deepest' and 'strongest' defense of the thought of presence. 38

In his early essay 'Ousia and Gramme,' Derrida starts from a footnotein Heidegger's Sein und Zeit in order to put forward his own critique of theWestern concept of time. Just like Heidegger, Derrida criticizes the long tradition, stretching from Aristotle to Hegel, of conceptualizing time from themetaphysical idea of the now/present. Derrida, however, endeavors to offera counter-reading of the thinkers whom Heidegger criticizes. He wants toshow that the great texts of metaphysics are not only about the so called'vulgar' concept of time but that they also contain the elements to deconstruct this time from within. Unlike Heidegger, Derrida goes beyond ananalysis of the paradoxes and aporias in the history of metaphysics in orderto look for the seeds of a different notion of time right at the heart of thistradition. Aristotle, for example, according to Derrida, not only initiateda long tradition of metaphysical thinking but also provided the tools todeconstruct this tradition and its concept of time.

Derrida attributes the most important aporias of the metaphysical notionof time to its use of the concept of the unified and self-identical 'now' thatboth divides time infinitely and gives it the continuity of a line. AlthoughAristotle knew very well about these aporias, and explicitly exposed themin his exposition of commonsense time, he never really answered the questions he himself raised. The history of metaphysical thinking, according toDerrida, is constituted by this omission and is possible only by endlesslyevading the questions on the aporetic nature of timeY Derrida especiallyresists the metaphysical idea of the absolutely synchronic present or 'now'because it excludes the possibility of spectrality or coexistence of the noncontemporaneous. Arguments about the non-coexistence of the parts oftime and arguments that distinguish time from space by conceptualizing itas an 'order of successions' rather than an 'order of coexistences,' accordingto Derrida, must already have been traditional in Aristotle's era, and thisstill remains so today:

A now cannot coexist, as a current and present now, with another nowas such. Coexistence has meaning only in the unity of a single, samenow. [... ] One cannot even say that the coexistence of two differentand equally present nows is impossible or unthinkable: the very signification of coexistence or of presence is constituted by this limit. Notto be able to coexist with an other (the same as itself), with an othernow, is not a predicate of the now, but its essence as presence. The now,presence in the act of the present, is constituted as the impossibility ofcoexisting with an other now, that is, with an other-the-same-as-itself.The now is (in the present indicative) the impossibility of coexisting

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with itself: with itself, that is, with an other self, an other now, an othersame, a double.40

Yet it is precisely this impossibility of the coexistence of two nows that,according to Derrida, falls prey to an internal contradiction and in hiswords only can be experienced as the 'possibility of the impossible.' Thevery idea of the impossibility of the coexistence of a now with another nowimplies that this other now is in a certain way the same and thus that it 'isalso a now as such, and that it coexists with that which cannot coexist withit.'41 'The impossibility of coexistence can be posited as such only on thebasis of a certain coexistence, of a certain simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous, in which the alterity and identity of the now are maintained togetherin the differentiated element of a certain same.'42 Although he warns thatthis word should be interpreted in a neutral sense that implies no position, activity, or agent, Derrida stresses that the aporias of time compel usto think in terms of a paradoxical 'synthesis,' which maintains togetherseveral 'current nows'[maintenants], which are said to belong to the pastor the future. This 'synthesis' or 'certain same' can be expressed by theGreek word hama, which means something like 'together,' 'all at once,' or'at the same time.' The importance of this little word for the possibility ofdeconstructing time, from within the tradition of metaphysics, can hardlybe overestimated. This word was used barely five times by Aristotle but,according to Derrida, provides 'the small key that both opens and closesthe history of metaphysics in terms of what it puts at stake.'43 AlthoughAristotle did not explicitly refer to the meaning of this word and even triedto hide it, it betrays an unconscious logic of the discontinuous, the nonlinear, or the plural in his conception of time. This 'temporal clue,' accordingto Derrida, should make it possible to think of a time that is no longerdominated by a present or a now that has the impossibility of coexistingwith the non-contemporaneous as its essence.

A radical rethinking of time, moreover, according to Derrida, can neversimply be a matter of 'complicating' the concept of the present/now while stillretaining the notions of 'homogeneity' and 'successivity.' A mere complication of the structure of time, as pursued by Husserl, for example, will alwaysuphold linearity and remain metaphysical. As Derrida explains, even whenone accepts that each 'Now B' is constituted by the retention of a 'Now A'and the protention of 'Now C,' this model would still reinforce the commonsense notion of temporal successivity and make it impossible for a 'Now X'to take the place of a 'Now A.' As Derrida puts it in his Of Grammatology:

[This model of successivity] would prohibit that, by a delay that is inadmissible to consciousness, an experience be determined, in its verypresent, by a present which would not have preceded it immediately butwould be considerably 'anterior' to it. It is the problem of the deferredeffect (Nachtraglichkeit) of which Freud speaks.44


Or as he argues elsewhere:

The structure of delay (Nachtraglichkeit) in effect forbids that onemake of temporalization (temporization) a simple dialectical complication of the living present as an originary and unceasing synthesis-asynthesis constantly directed back on itself, gathered in on itself andgathering-of retentional traces and protentional openings. The alterity of the 'unconscious' makes us concerned not with horizons ofmodified-past or future-presents, but with a 'past' that has neverbeen present, and which never will be, whose future to come will neverbe a production or a reproduction in the form of presence. Thereforethe concept of trace is incompatible with the concept of retention, ofthe becoming-past of what has been present. One cannot think thetrace-and therefore, dif(erance-on the basis of the present, or of thepresence of the present.45

In other words, hama introduces a dimension of exteriority into the interiority of time, and by 'contaminating' the isolated metaphysical present/now it comes to empower the central deconstructive notion of dif(erance,about which Derrida himself remarks that it stands for the complex 'constitution of the present, as an "originary" and irreducibly nonsimple.'46

MEDITATING ON A CERTAIN 'NON-PRESENCE'

The idea of spectrality in Specters of Marx should be understood as a radical and political elaboration by the later Derrida of his early deconstructive thinking. The 'specter' is firmly based on Derrida's life-long project ofdeconstructing metaphysical time.47 Although it is surely historical, a 'spectral moment,' according to Derrida, cannot be dated according to a calendar and does not fit into time-at least not into time conceived as a series ofmodalized presents (past present, actual present, and future present). Thepresent is 'out of joint' because it fuses and incorporates elements of thepast and the future, because it is always haunted by ghosts or revenants. AsFredric Jameson comments, spectrality could easily be described as:

what ma kes the present waver [... ] Derrida's ghosts are these momentsin which the present-and above all our current present, the wealthy,sunny, gleaming world of the post-modern and the end of history, ofthe new world system of late capitalism-unexpectedly betrays US. 48

Ghosts introduce a constant 'anachrony' into the present; they provokean 'untimeliness and disadjustment of the contemporary.'49 The specter,therefore, is not just a piece of 'traumatic' past popping up into the present;rather, its logic questions the entire traditional relationship among past,

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present, and future. Derrida is well aware of the radicalism of his thesisabout the non-contemporaneity of the present with itself, and he knowshow difficult it is to rethink time in an academic context:

within philosophy there is no possible objection concerning this privilege of the present-now; it defines the very element of philosophicalthought, it is evidence itself, conscious thought itself, it governs everypossible concept of truth and sense. [ ... ] This conflict, necessarily unlike any other, is between philosophy, which is always a philosophy ofpresence, and a meditation on nonpresence-which is not perforce itscontrary, or necessarily a meditation on a negative absence, or a theoryof nonpresence qua consciousness. 50

Derrida also stresses that his spectral logic does not introduce some kindof new metaphysical category. Rather, he says, it is a logic that is implicitly needed in any critique of abstraction, idealization, ideologization, orfetishization. 51 It is important not to isolate Derrida's idea of spectral survival from his deconstruction of the historical or 'living' present. WarrenMontag rightly claims that the possibility of spectrality in the first placedepends on Derrida's concept of the 'trace,' which cannot be summed upin the simplicity of a present. 'It is thus irreducible to a present or presence which might become a past or absence: its very non-contemporaneitydetermines the possibility of its persistence.' The specter, then, is simplythat which 'was never alive enough to die, never present enough to becomeabsent.'52 In other words, spectrality or the denial of absolute 'absence' is thelogical other of Derrida's life-long deconstruction of absolute 'presence.'

Although Specters of Marx elaborates on Derrida's project of deconstruction, I remarked above that it also includes a more affirmative move.The figure of the specter must justify the passage from a 'technico-ontological' disadjustment of time to a problematic of ethics and justice thatcannot be grasped in terms of mere ontology. 53 Every reflection on (in)justice and ethics, Derrida claims, should be closely related to a reflection onthe disjointed nature of time and the other way around. Interpretations ofHamlet's enigmatic saying that the time is 'out of joint,' for example, havealways doubted a literal reading that takes Hamlet's utterance to refer tothe ontological structure of time and a metaphorical reading that considers it as a primarily ethical statement. Prominent French translations ofHamlet's phrase, for instance, have taken different forms: Yves Bonnefoy'ssafe translation reads 'Le temps est hors de ses gonds,' another more riskytranslation speaks about 'Le temps est detraque,' but still another oneinterprets the phrase as referring to the state of the world-'Le monde estCl l'envers'-and Andre Gide's translation, together with that of some others, radically opts for an ethical reading as 'Cette epoque est deshonoree.'54Also, Derrida writes, Heidegger has demonstrated in his 'Der Spruch desAnaximander' that the Greek words for justice (Dike) and injustice (Adikia)


are etymologically closely related, respectively, to the concepts of joining,adjoining, adjustment, and articulation-or in Heidegger's language Fugand Fuge-and the notions of the disjointed, the twisted, and the out-ofline. It should not be considered a coincidence, according to Derrida, thatHeidegger's etymologically inspired translation of the expression Adikia as'aus den Fugen' or 'aus den Fugen gehen' is also the German equivalent of'out of joint.'55

Derrida does not believe the relation between time and (in)justice to bestraightforward or unequivocal, however. The disjointedness of time canbe a feature of injustice, but it also conditions the very possibility of justice.At least this is the case if one wants to move the concept of justice beyondthe practices of vengeance, punishment, or even restitution with their logicof 'calculable equality,' of 'symmetrizing and synchronic accountability,'or of a mere 'doing right,' in order to make possible the incalculable andnon-economical relation with others of which Emmanuel Levinas says it isthe basis of all ethics. 56 Absolute presence, Derrida argues, never has beenthe condition or the object of justice; justice always assumes a certain senseof anachronism. Ethics cannot restrict itself to the present and the livinggenerations. One must always remember that the impossible (to let the deadbury their dead) can happen; that, for Derrida, is absolute evil: an absolutepresence that does not want to hear about death. As we have seen, his critique directly addresses Fukuyama and his end-of-history idea that declaresthe death of the past and tries to exorcise all specters in the name of anabsolute present. That Derrida's chronosophy is related intimately to thepolitics of memory becomes clear when he approvingly quotes Yosef HayimYerushalmi's rhetorical question 'whether it is possible that the antonymof "forgetting" is not "remembering," but justice.'57 Much like Benjamin,Derrida fiercely resists the reigning teleological time of progress, whereinpast and present injustice can always be justified or legitimized by referringto a future catharsis. Only the promise of memorizing the unjust and thememorization of the promise of justice can counter such a totalitarian andan immoral logic. 58

After having stressed the many fruitful aspects of Derrida's work, let metake some distance and formulate some criticisms. Although Derrida canhelp us rethink the notion of historicity, and although his deconstruction,as Geoff Bennington argues, could in a sense be called 'the most historical of discourses imaginable,' it cannot be denied that Derrida's work alsomanifests striking ahistorical features. Such an ahistorical dimension canbe seen clearly, for example, in Derrida's account of the metaphysics ofpresence. As we have seen above, Derrida claims that the tradition of Western thought for at least two and a half millennia has been characterizedby the same metaphysical privileging of presence. The same metaphysicalpresuppositions, for example, according to Derrida, have figured in Western theories of time from Aristotle to Kant over Marx to even Heidegger,

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no matter whether these thinkers were antique or medieval, modern orpre-modern. The metaphysics of presence thus seems to take on a strangetrans-historical character in Derrida's thought.

Similar historical deficits can be observed in the alternative philosophical concepts with which Derrida proposes to replace the metaphysics ofpresence. Notions of spectrality and of the out-of-jointness of time, despiteDerrida's disclaimers, often seem to refer to a- or trans-historical phenomena. About Derrida's thesis that the time is out of joint, Sande Cohen rightlyremarks that it tends toward a 'timeless ahistoricity' because it is all toooften presented as a kind of primordial reality that is eternal and unchanging. To cite Cohen's fairly enigmatic words:

What is affirmed is that 'the time is out of joint' is always true, henceevery present is always nonpresent to itself, yet present to itself in exactly that way, therefore related to spirits and specters, which are indices of our avoidance of what haunts us. The present is to be imaginedas an always nonpresent present in its own nonpresence. Of coursethis relation (understanding Derrida) is also then meta-metahistorical,since it affirms that no reading of Marx or of the present can take placewithout the 'first' verbal body of spirit always with us. Hypercontinuity: spirits and specters run on a timeless timing. 59

A similar criticism is formulated by David Wood. According to Wood,Derrida in his rigid juxtaposing of the logic of identity and the logic ofdifference-and his rejection of the entire tradition of Western philosophyas trapped in the former-reproduces a traditional, essentialist, and metaphysical philosophical opposition.60 Despite Derrida's repeated statementsthat the concept of time will always remain metaphysical and his criticismof Heidegger's attempts to conceive of a non-metaphysical primordial time,one could ask whether the core deconstructive notions of diffirance andtrace do not themselves take the form of a primordial temporality. As Woodpoints out, Derrida's stress on the transcendental status of differance-hisclaim that absolutely nothing can precede it and that all forms of presenceare based on it-is engaged in a 'high grade mimicry of transcendentalarguments.'61 According to Wood, Derrida can neither claim the originarystatus of diffirance nor defend its privilege over presence without lapsinginto self-stultification. However, asking the rhetorical question of whetherthere is place for a notion of differance without this attached privilege,Wood answers that there is and that it is 'at precisely the same level as thereis room for "presences," "unities," and "identities" functioning withoutthe metaphysical security that philosophy is apt to bestow upon them.'62He adds that:

The level just referred to, at which presence and diffirance meet without privilege, I would call the level of human finitude. We are satis-


fied with partial answers to questions, incompletely fulfilled meanings,good enough cases of immediacy. We do have a tacit knowledge of contexts, we construe situations, we know what it is to see a piece of paper,to go for a walk, and so forth. Derrida would probably not dispute this.What I think he forgets is that it is from these everyday securities, andour tacit grasp, however vague and average, that we necessarily startwhen considering, say, the contribution of differance to their constitution. The always-already present is the condition for differance beingthinkable. [... ] The play of differance is not infinite. [... ] Differenceand identity, or differance and presence, are each linked pairs, and itmight be salutary to think of metaphysics as the result of a hypertrophic privileging of one of the terms in each pair. 63

8 History and the Work of Mourning

Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope inthe past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safefrom the enemy if he wins.

W. Benjamin 1

Wood's criticism of the transcendental understanding of differance is important because it dissuades us from replacing the absolute concept of time thatwe criticized with another agency that would similarly structure or underlieall of reality. First and foremost, however, a criticism of the transcendentaland ahistorical interpretation of the notion of differance and of the relatedidea that the time is out of joint is crucial because these phenomena, as wehave seen, condition the possibility of spectrality. As long as we cannot conceive of different quantities or qualities of differance-i.e. of dif(erance asnon-(self)identical-we will not be able to conceive of changing intensitiesof spectrality or haunting. That, however, is important because a genuinelyhistorical approach to spectrality must be able to account for the fact thatsome 'pasts' haunt more than others and the fact that there exist differentlevels in which a present can be haunted. A genuinely historical accountof haunting will, for example, need to be able to explain that situations ofviolence and civil war tend to produce a much more vigorously persistingpast than peaceful and stable situations.

INTRODUCTION

Until now I have dedicated the largest part of this book to an analysis thatattempts to understand the phenomena of the irrevocable past and of performativity by focusing on notions of time and temporality. In this chapter I wouldlike to complement this analysis by approaching the matter from a somewhatdifferent angle: I will try to deepen our understanding of the irrevocable and ofthe performative by relating them to the problems of mourning and death.

Lately, several influential historians and philosophers of history haveargued that a close relationship exists between the writing of history andthe work of mourning. Dominick LaCapra, for example, analyzes post-holocaust historiography by using the psychoanalytical concepts of 'workingthrough' and 'acting out,' and he has proposed that the German Historikerstreit should be interpreted as a form of collective mourning. 2 Jarn Riisenargues that in relation to the traumatic character of the experiences of thelast century, the writing of history can be conceived as a 'procedure ofmourning.' 'The relationship to the past; Riisen writes, 'can be comparedto the relationship to deceased persons or objects in the mourning process;and, he adds, 'so in a simple logical argumentation one can say that mourning is constitutive for historical thinking in general and in principle.'3 Similarly, Ewa Domanska states that historical discourse is dependent on thediscourse of death. As she explains, 'Indeed, when speaking of the deadbody, we touch the very essence of historical discourse which, arguably,originates from the contemplation of dead body. Without death there wouldbe no history. History feeds on death. History begins in the grave.'4

I agree with LaCapra, Riisen, and Domanska that a close relationshipexists between mourning and historiography, and I think that these authorsare right when they argue that a lot can be learned about the writing ofhistory by analyzing it from the perspective of the practice of mourning orthe discourse on death. When discussing the case of the Argentine Madresde Plaza de Mayo, for example, I remarked that the resistance against theirreversible time of history often manifests itself as a refusal to take on the


task of mourning and to recognize (the metaphor of) death. In the preliminary conclusion following the three case studies, I claimed, moreover, thatthe spectral figure of the desaparecido and the idea of wandering ancestralspirits have to be interpreted as reflections of particular conceptions of historicity. However, in this chapter, I will argue that what one learns fromthe comparison between history and the discourse on death or the practiceof mourning depends very much on the conception of death or the model ofmourning from which one starts.

Already in the mid-1970s, Michel de Certeau remarked that modernhistoriography is based on a particular conception of death, adding thatthis historiography takes for granted the fact that it has become impossibleto believe in this presence of the dead that has organized (or organizes) theexperience of entire civilizations.'5 Below I, therefore, argue that one cananalytically distinguish between at least two profoundly different conceptsof mourning and death that relate to different notions of historicity: namely,a modern (mostly Western) concept of mourning and a non-modern (butnot necessarily non-Western) concept of mourning. The most importantdifference between the relatively young modernist theory of mourning andthe much older and much more widespread non-modern concept of mourning, I will argue, can be found in the different ways in which they relatethe notions of 'loss' and 'absence.'6 These differing accounts of the relationbetween 'loss' and 'absence,' I will try to demonstrate, in their turn give riseto differing notions of performativity ('the work of mourning') and differing accounts of ethics ('the ethics of mourning'). Arguing that the moderntheory of mourning shares many intellectual features with modern conceptions of history, I will try to show how an analysis of the former can helpus understand why it is generally so hard for modern thinkers to recognizethe performative potential and the full ethical implications of discursivepractices of history.

After contrasting modern and non-modern models of mourning and discussing the way they relate to different concepts of time and history, wewill have to deal with the question of what concept of mourning best corresponds with the notion of the irrevocable. In an attempt to answer thisquestion, I will once more turn to the work of Jacques Derrida and, moreprecisely, to his uncommon approach to mourning, about which it can beargued that it is neither strictly modern nor non-modern.

MODERN MOURNING: FREUD'S LEGACY

The easiest way to analyze the prevailing modern theory of mourning isdoubtlessly by focusing on the work of Sigmund Freud, and more specificallyon the extraordinary influential account of mourning that the latter developed in his essay 'Mourning and Melancholia' (published in 1917). Mourning plays only a subordinate role in this essay, which focuses primarily on

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History and the Work of Mourning 149

melancholia, and Freud (partially) revised his theory of mourning in lateressays, but it has been passages from 'Mourning and Melancholia' thatcame to influence both the psychoanalytical and the broader Western conceptualization of mourning.

In 'Mourning and Melancholia,' the concept of mourning mainly functions as a way to throw light on the phenomenon of melancholia. The comparison between mourning and melancholia is justifiable, according to Freud,because both can be considered reactions to some kind of loss (of a belovedperson or of some 'abstraction' that takes the place of one: i.e. an ideal, acountry, liberty, etc.) and because both share a particular set of psychological features (such as loss of interest in the outside world, loss of capacity tolove, etc.). Nevertheless, the two mental states have to be distinguished rigorously. Although melancholia can be considered a pathological dispositionthat can linger for the rest of one's life, mourning, according to Freud, is atemporary and a normal feature of life. As he puts it, 'it never occurs to usto regard [mourning] as a pathological condition and to refer it to medicaltreatment. We rely on its being overcome after a certain lapse of time, andwe look upon any interference with it as useless or even harmful.'7

Although it can be very painful, mourning performs a useful 'work.' Thiswork of mourning starts, Freud argues, after 'reality-testing' has shown that'the loved object no longer exists' and demands that all 'libidinal' attachments that only live on in the ego of the bereaved are withdrawn from thelost object. In other words, 'reality' demands that the bereaved accepts thatthe lost one has become absent. As one commentator puts it, the work ofmourning for Freud becomes a matter of 'internal reviewing and dealingwith the mental images of the lost item.'8 Of course, this demand oftenarouses opposition. It is 'a matter of general observation,' Freud writes, thatpeople are never fond of abandoning any 'libidinal position,' even if plentyof 'substitutes' for the loved person or object are available.

Sometimes the demand of detachment is so painful that the bereavedperson turns away from 'reality' while 'clinging to the object through themedium of a hallucinatory wishful psychosis.'9 And in many cases the beliefin the existence of the lost object is temporarily psychologically prolongedbecause the detachment takes so much energy and so much time. Normally,however, 'respect for reality gains the day,' and the 'command of reality'is carried out piecemeal. 'The fact is,' Freud states, 'that when the workof mourning is completed, the ego becomes free and uninhibited again.'loNormal mourning, then, according to the Freud of 'Mourning and Melancholia,' contrasts with pathological mourning in that by definition it is limited in time. Its main differentiation from melancholia (as a special case ofpathological mourning) is situated in the fact that normal mourning experiences loss on a conscious level and that the bereaved ego knows that itmerely has to detach itself from a set of interiorized mental representationsof the deceased. The melancholic person, in contrast, often denies loss orexperiences loss on an unconscious level, which can result in self-hatred or


a decreased self-esteem when anxiety and anger about the loss turn themselves against the ego. To cite Freud, 'In mourning it is the world which hasbecome poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.'ll

Now, as I already remarked, although it made it into the dominant twentieth-century approach in the West, the detachment and substitution theoryof mourning developed in 'Mourning and Melancholia' was not Freud'sfinal account. Freud made an important revision to the theory of mourningin his essay titled 'the Ego and the Id' (1923).12 In this essay, Freud distanceshimself from his earlier idea that mourning, in contrast to melancholia,can be ended easily after a certain lapse of time and that the ego alwaysreemerges 'free' and 'unbound' after it completes the task of mourning.Possibly under the influence of painful experiences of loss in his private life,Freud came to believe that the contrast between mourning and melancholiawas less rigid than he had supposed earlier on. Instead of being restrictedto melancholia, he argues, the psychological mechanism that deals withpainful loss by identifying with the lost object and by keeping the mentalrepresentations of the deceased person in the ego for a long time is, infact, widespread and fairly typical of most types of mourning.13 AlthoughFreud does not doubt the reality principle that postulates the absence ofthe dead, and although psychological detachment remains Freud's ideal,it now seems clear to him that not every part of the human psyche dealswith the 'demands of reality' in the same way after a loss has occurred.Similar to what Freud already argued about melancholia in 'Mourning andMelancholia,' there seems to be a critical agency in the mourner's psychethat restrains the ego from promptly obeying the reality principle. Becausethe phenomenon is so widespread, this critical agency, according to Freud,deserves to be considered a relatively autonomous and separate part of theself-he speaks about an 'ego-ideal' or a 'super-ego' that has to be differentiated from the 'ego' and the 'id.' This way the theory of mourning takes acentral place in Freud's famous splitting of the self.

I will return to Freud's theory of mourning below, but for now it shouldbe noted that while Freud produces an innovative and subtle theory aboutthe self, his work on mourning lacks an elaborate notion of the social. Inboth his earliest and later accounts, mourning and melancholia are conceptualized as personal phenomena, and Freud never really engages in ananalysis of collective mourning. As Martin Bergmann remarks, this factonly becomes stranger, considering that Freud wrote his theories of mourning during and shortly after one of the greatest social catastrophes of thetwentieth century, which brought collective loss and the need for collective mourning to an unseen scale. 14 Another striking absence in Freud'saccounts of mourning is that of any reference to ritual dimensions: Freudnever studies or comments on the function of (collective) mourning rituals.Although it is hard to assess to what extent Freud's theory of mourning is theproduct of broader social and cultural trends and to what extent his ideasinfluenced these broader trends, it is clear that his account of mourning


embodies most of the characteristics that sociologists have attributed to thetypical Western practices of mourning during the twentieth century: theirprivatization, individualization, and psychologization.15

NON-MODERN PRACTICES OF MOURNING

Let us now contrast Freud's archetypically modernist account of mourningwith a brief sketch of some general characteristics of non-modern conceptions of mourning. Of course there is no such thing as one unified nonmodern practice, or even concept, of mourning: Indeed, anthropologistsare fond of pointing out an infinite series of subtle differences in mourningrituals and funeral practices in diverse cultures and subcultures all over theworld. However, because my main interest is to draw some rough contrastsand because my focus is merely analytical, it will suffice to resort to twoclassical accounts of non-modern mourning rituals that have been offeredby the anthropologists Robert Hertz and Arnold van Gennep in 1907 and1909, respectively.

Non-modern burial rituals and practices of mourning, Robert Hertzargues, only can be understood if one comes to see that human death cannot be reduced to a merely biological or physiological phenomenon (as,according to him, it is all too often done by modern Western observers)but always involves social and cultural dimensions.16 In 'our society,' Hertzclaims, writing in France at the beginning of the twentieth century, it isgenerally believed that death occurs 'in one instant.' Although a 'moreor less prolonged' period of mourning begins after a death occurs, andalthough commemorative ceremonies are sometimes held in honor of thedeceased for a certain period of time, the deceased himself or herself isbelieved to be gone and his/her body can be buried right away. As Hertzexplains, 'The only purpose of the two or three days' delay between thedemise and the burial is to allow material preparations to be made and tosummon relatives and friends.'!? Much more common than the modernistidea of an instantaneous death, however, death in many cultures is believedto be a process-a process moreover that demands for ritual interventionsand that imposes a set of obligations on the living. This approach to death,according to Hertz, is reflected in a funeral practice that in many variationsis very widespread: the practice of the double burial. In many cultures, itis a custom to organize a temporary funeral during which the body of thedeceased is placed in a temporary shelter before it is taken to a final burialplace during a second ceremony.

Until the final burial rite is performed, the communities of the living aswell as the deceased are believed to be exposed to grave perils. This is clearfrom the fact that the practice of the double funeral involves concerns notonly about the body of the deceased but also about his/her soul and aboutthe well-being of the survivors. As Hertz explains:


In the same way as the body is not taken at once to its 'last restingplace,' so the soul does not reach its final destination immediately afterdeath. It must first undergo a kind of probation, during which it stayson earth in the proximity of the body, wandering in the forest or frequenting the places it inhabited while it was alive: it is only at the endof this period, at the time of the second funeral, and thanks to a specialceremony, that it will enter the land of the dead. ls

For a while the soul of the deceased is thus stuck between two worlds, andit has no resting place until the final burial feast. This dreadful position ofthe deceased soul explains why it can become a threat to the survivors:

It is thus not surprising that during this period the soul should be considered as a malicious being: it finds the solitude into which it has beenthrust hard to bear and tries to drag the living with it. [... ] It watchesits relatives' mourning sharply and if they do not properly fulfill theirduties toward itself, if they do not actively prepare its release, it becomesirritated and inflicts diseases upon them, for death has endowed it withmagical powers which enable it to put its bad intentions into practice.19

The task of mourning with which the surviving relatives are burdened notonly has to be carried out meticulously in order to appease the soul of thedeceased but also includes a set of social prohibitions that serve to protectthe broader community. Because death and the corpse are, in many cultures,considered contagious, surviving relatives are often subject to a series oftaboos and are separated from the rest of society by a ban. They are orderedto wear a different dress, take on a different diet, often cannot receive anyvisitors, and sometimes are confined to their houses for long periods.

Thus, in contrast to its modernist variation, which mostly restricts thetask of mourning to the inner life of the individual and treats it in primarily psychological terms, non-modern mourning commonly is an inherentlycollective phenomenon that has far-reaching social implications. Althoughthe custom of the double burial comes in many variations, it is generallyorganized around a set of common assumptions about the nature of death.First, Hertz argues, instead of being completed instantaneously, death isunderstood as a lengthy process that mostly is considered to be terminatedonly when the deceased's body is entirely decomposed. Second, death isconsidered to be a transition rather than a mere destruction.

This notion of death as transition brings us to the work of Arnold vanGennep. Van Gennep's main intellectual contribution to the analysis ofmourning was to propose that non-modern mourning practices or funeraryrituals have to be interpreted as rites of passage. 20 Funeral rites, comparableto other rites of passage such as the ones performed to mark the passage ofboyhood into manhood, to accompany childbirth, marriage, ete., van Gennep claims, follow a structural model that can be broken down into three


interrelated but distinct phases of separation, transition, and incorporation. Interestingly, van Gennep's research data-in contrast to what wouldbe expected from a modernist perspective-showed that not the rites ofseparation but the rites of transition and rites of incorporation figure mostprominently in non-modern practices of mourning. Clearly, what mostlypreoccupies non-modern cultures confronted with loss is the transitional or'liminal' status in between death and life of both the deceased and, throughthe logic of contagion, the living relatives. The complex and elaborate ritesof transition and incorporation, then, primarily aim at restoring the borders between life and death. As van Gennep explains:

Mourning, which I formerly saw simply as an aggregate of taboos andnegative practices marking an isolation from society of those whomdeath, in its physical reality, had placed in a sacred, impure state, nowappears to me to be a more complex phenomenon. It is a transitionalperiod for the survivors, and they enter it through rites of separationand emerge from it through rites of reintegration into society (rites ofthe lifting of mourning). In some cases, the transitional period of theliving is a counterpart of the transitional period of the deceased, andthe termination of the first sometimes coincides with the terminationof the second-that is, with the incorporation of the deceased into theworld of the dead. 21

Like Robert Hertz, van Gennep stresses that non-modern mourning isessentially a collective concern with many social dimensions. Traditionally,all social life is suspended during the period of mourning, and how longthis takes depends on the degree of kinship of the survivors to the deceasedor on the social status of the dead person. If the deceased was an important king, for example, van Gennep explains, the entire society could beexpected to interrupt normal social life for a period of several months.

Although the idea of death as a transition-rather than something thathappens at an instance and itself takes no time-can, seem pretty alien froma modernist perspective, it of course has not been and still is not absent inthe socio-cultural history of the West. The custom of organizing a vigil forthe deceased, which once was quite universal in the West and in fact onlydisappeared relatively recently, indeed, reflects the belief that death is aprocess and that the soul of the dead person stays in or around the corpsefor a certain period in which it has to be guarded.

Moreover, although Freud's early theory of mourning in terms of libidinal detachment and substitution has been very influential and has remainedlargely uncontested in the West for a long time, recently it is criticized onseveral fronts. Many express their discomfort with the idea that attachments to lost loved ones can easily be run down and substituted by newattachments. The opposition to the classical modernist account of mourning is not only cast in ethical or emotional terms, however. An important


reaction comes from a group of psychologists who claim that the classicalmodel of mourning underestimates the enduring attachments or 'continuingbonds' that most bereaved persons maintain with the deceased. 22 Abundantresearch data, they argue, show that the process of bereavement is not primarily 'a stage of disengagement' but, rather, that grieving persons oftenmerely alter and then continue their relationship to the dead. Of course,the bereaved have to change their relationship to the lost person, and thischange is quite radical, but this does not necessarily imply that the relationship ends. Studies on widows, parental bereavement, and bereaved children,for example, show that many bereaved people for a long time or even for therest of their lives continue to feel the presence of their lost relatives and thatthey sometimes engage in relationships with the dead quite consciously. Incontrast with the dominant Western model of the twentieth century, whichposited that mourners must let go of the past and defined any sustainedrelationship with the dead in terms of pathology, several psychologists nowargue that bereaved persons should not be forced to put the past to rest orto focus on new attachments in the present. As one commentator explains,recent research shows that, 'Remaining connected seemed to facilitate bothadults' and children's ability to cope with the loss and the accompanyingchanges in their lives. These "connections" provided solace, comfort andsupport, and eased the transition from the past to the future.'23 That thedominant model of 'healthy' mourning was, and still is, so resistant toempirical falsification and that it is so stubborn in claiming that detachmentis the normal end result of mourning is the effect of a set of modernist ideasand ideals about the nature of the self and the sovereignty of the individualthat are more wish than reality.24 As one commentator argues:

The fashionable idea that the purpose of grief is to detach from thedeceased and move on is based neither on research nor clinical experience, but on the western cultural value of autonomy. 25

WHAT DOES MOURNING TELL US ABOUT HISTORY?

Our main focus here is not in the first place directed at an analysis of concepts and practices of mourning in and for themselves. Rather, as I alreadyindicated, I want to discuss whether and how these different models ofmourning can teach us something about history. In this perspective, one ofthe most striking differences between modern and non-modern concepts ofmourning is found in the different ways in which they perceive (the bordersbetween) life and death and in the different ways in which they couple thenotions of 'loss' and 'absence.' Although death is obviously experiencedas a form of loss (why else would one grieve?), non-modern practices ofmourning reflect a widespread belief that death does not (immediately, initself) render the deceased person (entirely) absent and that, accordingly,

*I~

II

I


the boundaries between life and death are not absolute. If it is a correcthypothesis that there is a direct relation between the way one conceives ofdeath and the way one conceives of historicity, or, as Jarn Riisen puts it,that mourning is 'constitutive' of historicity, then the non-modern set ofideas about the dead is incompatible with the idea of an absent past or astrict separation between past and present.

The Freudian archetype of modern mourning, in contrast, gives us apicture that fits much better with the notion of the absent or distant past.This might seem strange at first sight because Freud often is presented asa theorist of the haunting past. 26 To a certain extent, this is of course true.Freud had a special interest in the theme of haunting, and his psychotherapeutic theory of 'Nachtraglichkeit' often has been believed to imply a radical rethinking of timeY In his essay 'Thoughts for the Times on War andDeath,' for example, Freud seems to develop a thesis about the persistenceof the past when, in order to explain the abominations of the First WorldWar, he claims the survival of ancient instinctual impulses in modernman. 28 Similarly, Freud's account of mourning (at least the one in 'The Egoand the Id') seems to include some sense of the persisting past when he recognizes that survivors often psychologically prolong the presence of theirlost relatives by incorporating them as mental images into their ego. However, this survival of primeval psychological mechanisms and the hauntingpersistence of images of the dead, according to Freud, are dependent on thespecial structure of the human psyche that strongly contrasts with all other'external' or 'material' dimensions of reality. As Freud explains,

the development of the mind shows a peculiarity which is present in noother developmental process. When a village grows into a town or achild into a man, the village and the child become lost in the town andthe man. Memory alone can trace the old features in the new picture;in fact the old materials or forms have been got rid of and replaced bynew ones. It is otherwise with the development of the mind. Here onecan describe the state of affairs, which has nothing to compare with it,only by saying that in this case every earlier stage of development persists alongside the later stage which has arisen from it; here successionalso involves co-existence, although it is to the same materials that thewhole series of transformations has applied. The earlier mental statemay not have manifested itself for years, but none the less it is so farpresent that it may at any time again become the mode of expressionof the forces in the mind, and indeed the only one, as though all laterdevelopments had been annulled or undone. 29

Despite or because of its exceptional status, the special temporality or historicity of the psyche, in Freud's view, as we have seen, is subordinate tothe broader reality principle that is that of the 'transience of all things' andthe absence of the lost. As it is clearly expressed in the short but revealing


essay titled 'On Transience,' it is the universal law of transience that makesthe task of mourning into an incontestable obligation. 30 In Freud's perspective, mourning indeed comes to function as a mere self-adaptation to external reality: The work of mourning realizes in the realm of the mind whattime and history have already realized in the world outside. The refusalor inability to mourn and the psychological continuation of any relationwith the dead, thus, in the end only can be interpreted as a kind of runningbehind or a disadjustment to the pace of the irreversible time of history.

In other words, it can be argued that Freud, instead of being the theoristof the irrevocable or haunting past, reduces the irrevocable from a broadsocial and historical phenomenon to a quasi-pathology that should be situated in the psyche of the individual. If non-modern practices of mourningreflect a worldview in which (dimensions of) the past persist in all possiblespheres of reality, Freud's theory reduces that survival to the small andisolated isle of human memory.31 Freud is well aware of the non-modernpractices of mourning and of the widespread belief in ancestors or lingeringspirits. Instead of interpreting this belief as a reflection of alternative notionsof historicity, however, he interprets it as 'characteristic of [ ... ] low levelsof culture' and, more exactly, as the result of an incapacity on the part of'primitives' to accept and grasp the realities of death and transienceY

Closely related to their different stance on the relation between loss andabsence, modern and non-modern models of mourning also stronglydiffer in their account of performativity and their approach to ethics.Although in both the modern and non-modern approaches mourning isperceived to be performative (i.e. that it 'works'), this performativity isinterpreted in opposite ways. Although one should be well aware of theproblematic character of this dichotomy, it could be said that non-modernand modern notions of mourning can be distinguished from each other bytheir respective stress on 'external' and 'internal' forms of performativity.As we have seen, non-modern practices of mourning are commonly basedon the idea that the process of death asks for active (ritual) intervention.Although non-modern mourning has great implications for the (socialand mental) life of survivors, its main focus is on the dead themselves: onthe precarious fate of their bodies, but especially on the fallible separation from the world of the living, the temporary liminality, and finallythe incorporation into the world of ancestors of their souls. From the perspective ~f the living, we therefore could speak about an 'external' performativity of the non-modern work of mourning. The dominant moderntheory of mourning, in contrast, has no sense of such an external performativity because it is embedded in the belief that the dead are gone: thebelief in the absence of the lost. Because the deceased person, accordingto the modern approach, in a strict sense does not exist any longer, thereis literally nothing to perform on. The modern approach rather involves a

History and the Work of Mourning

process of psychologization and individualization that redefines mourning as something that exclusively takes place inside the mind of individualsurvivors. The main focus of the modern work of mourning can thereforebe called 'internal.'

The respective stress on internal or external performativity obviouslyalso has ethical implications. In line with its external performativity, nonmodern mourning develops an ethics that is primarily based on a responsibility toward the dead. Modern mourning, in contrast, faces the problemof what one commentator caBs 'impractible defense.'33 Because the deadno longer exist, they can no longer be harmed or defended, and so nodirect ethical responsibility can be developed toward them. The modernaccount of mourning, therefore, comes with a rather minimalist (but notnecessarily less compelling) ethics that primarily focuses on the recovery ofsurvivors and often takes the form of a (clinical) injunction of detachment.The difference between modern and non-modern ethics of mourning ismost obvious when one considers their (potential or probable) reactions toa refusal to mourn, such as the one we found in the case of the ArgentineMadres de Plaza de Mayo. The Madres' refusal to mourn would probably be rejected as much in a context of non-modern mourning as in thecontext of the modern mourning. However, from the perspective of thenon-modern account of mourning, the refusal to mourn is primarily anoffense toward the dead (who are denied the ritual intervention they need)and toward society (which depends on the strict observation of mourningrituals for its protection against spirit attacks and contagious death). Fromthe perspective of the modern theory of mourning, in contrast, the refusalto mourn primarily comes to be seen as a regrettable offense against one'sown psychological recovery and autonomy. Rather than being interpretedas an offense against the dead or against society, the refusal to mourn tendsto be conceived of as a form of pathology because it allegedly involves animpossible rebellion against the reality principle or against the passingtime itself.

Of course I do not propose a choice between one, of the two accountsmourning and their ethics. I only aimed to show that different models ofmourning relate to differing accounts of history. The analysis of differentstrands of mourning raises some important questions about our conceptualization of history and more exactly about the phenomenon of the irrevocable: What do the borders between past and present look like (are theyliminal?), and if there is such a thing as the irrevocable, what is its locusand what is its modus? Where and how does the past persist? Exclusivelyin individual memory or in the psyche of bereaved survivors? And howshould that memory be conceived? In an attempt to provide some answersto these questions, I now turn to the theory of mourning that JacquesDerrida has developed and that can be considered as a complement to histheory of spectrality.


BEYOND MODERN VS. NON-MODERN MOURNING:THE LEGACY OF JACQUES DERRIDA

It is hard to overestimate the weight of the theme of mourning in the work ofJacques Derrida. Starting from the early 1980s, Derrida has written a longseries of often very personal eulogies, memorial essays, and funeral orationsfor deceased colleagues and friends. 34 Although only some of these textstreat the theme of mourning explicitly, most of them do so implicitly, andall of them, as one commentator remarks, are texts of or in mourning and,therefore, can be considered as a 'delimitable mini-corpus within the corpus of Derrida.'35 This does not mean that the theme of mourning remainsunrelated to other parts of Derrida's thought. On the contrary, it is closelyconnected to a multiplicity of other themes in his oeuvre. At one occasion,Derrida even stated that 'the question of mourni ng [... ] is the very heartof any deconstruction.'36 Even if this statement is perhaps a hyperboleDerrida has spoken about several other themes as constituting the heart ofdeconstruction-it is definitely valid for the relationship between mourningand the deconstructive theme of spectrality. An analysis of Derrida's accountof mourning can therefore bring about a more profound understanding ofthe notion of spectrality and the claim that time is 'out of joint.'

Despite the stress on lingering specters, Derrida's thought cannot beinterpreted as a subspecies of the non-modern type of mourning that wedescribed above. Yet despite the great influence of Freud on his broaderphilosophy, Derrida's theory of mourning also deviates considerably fromthe dominant modernist account of mourning. Derrida's account of mourning, indeed, seems to be a mixture-a hybrid. As I will try to demonstrate,it can be interpreted as a critical dialogue with both the modern and nonmodern model of mourning. Moreover, it can help us in our attempt toanswer the questions mentioned above-namely, those about the locus andthe modus of the irrevocable, about the boundaries separating past andpresent, and about the status of memory.

Derrida's interest in mourning in the first place seems to derive from theethical dilemma that, according to him, it raises: Mourning, he claims, confronts us with an 'unbearable paradox of fidelity.'37 Although it is clearly aform of infidelity not to mourn the dead, to forget them, or to deny theirdeath, Derrida doubts whether the dominant modern practice of mourning is any more ethical or responsible toward the dead. Under the influence of psychoanalysis, Derrida complains, Western discourse of mourninghas been cast almost exclusively in terms of memory and interiorization.It depicts the process of mourning as one of 'idealizing incorporation' oreven of 'consumption' of the other. As he explains, 'It entails a movementin which an interiorizing idealization takes in itself or upon itself the bodyand voice of the other, the other's visage and person, ideally and quasiliterally devouring them.'38 Although the (temporary) interiorization of theimage and memory of a deceased friend or relative is most often meant well

and presented as an act of fidelity, Derrida questions whether it actuallycontributes to the 'safekeeping of the other as other' or whether it shouldrather be considered an act of narcissism or even of 'psychic plagiarism.'39It should be asked to what extent mourning preserves the deceased 'as other(a living person dead) inside me,' rather than considering him/her part ofthe mourner's memory or psyche and thus denying or reducing his/her otherness. Moreover, Derrida raises the question of whether the seeminglyaffectionate claims that pretend to keep the dead mentally alive and intactor to keep the dead 'safe {... Jinside me' should not rather be interpreted asimplicitly saying that they are 'dead save in me'-dead except for the imageguarded in my memory. Derrida's ethical dilemma of mourning can then beexpressed in the form of the following couple of questions:

Is the most distressing, or even the most deadly infidelity that of a possible mourning which would interiorize within us the image, idol, or idealof the other who is dead and lives only in us? Or is it that of the impossible mourning, which, leaving the other his alterity, respecting thus hisinfinite remove, either refuses to take or is incapable of taking the otherwithin oneself, as in the tomb or the vault of some narcissism?40

The only way out of this aporia-to mourn or not to mourn-Derridaconcludes, is by rethinking the modern theory of mourning so as to move itbeyond the idea of an idealizing interiorization that is eventually aiming atpsychological detachment. Instead of reducing the existence of the dead toa set of empty recollections in custody of the inner life of some survivors,Derrida creates an account of mourning that postulates the lasting influence of the dead and that aims at a continuing relation with them. Thisaccount breaks with the traditional juxtaposition of mourning and melancholia, and it depathologizes people's continued engagement with the dead.According to Derrida, this is necessary from an ethical and a political pointof view because mourning touches the core of the idea of the political.41

Deconstructing Interiority and Memory

To be sure, Derrida does not deny the undeniable reality of death: 'Theother is dead and nothing can save him from this death, nor can anyonesave us from it.'4Z It cannot be refuted, he argues, that the deceased is nolonger living in himself or herself. The only being of the dead is, indeed, 'inme' or 'in us' and more exactly in our 'bereaved memory.' Once death hastaken place, Derrida states, 'there is no longer any choice [... ] except thatbetween memory and hallucination.'43 To cite Derrida:

Everything remains 'in me' or 'in us,' 'between us,' upon the death ofthe other. Everything is entrusted to me; everything is bequeathed orgiven to us, and first of all to what I call memory-to the memory, the


place of this strange dative. All we seem to have left is memory, sincenothing appears able to come to us any longer, nothing is coming or tocome, from the other to the present.44

However, this does not mean that the deceased other simply belongs tothe past or that the existence of the dead can be reduced to the 'simpleinclusion of a narcissistic fantasy in a subjectivity that is close upon itselfor even identical to itself:45 The main problem of the modern account ofmourning, according to Derrida, is to be situated precisely in the notion of(inter)subjective interiority-the 'in me' or 'in us'-on the one hand andthe simplistic account of 'memory,' 'past,' and 'present' on the other. Let usstart with Derrida's deconstruction of the first notion.

If one wants to comprehend the continuing power (or 'force') of the deadover the living and understand how the dead resist the closure of interiorizing memory, Derrida argues, one has to stop thinking in terms of a simplistic opposition between the 'interior' and the 'exterior,' between whatbelongs to us and what belongs to the other, or between the 'gazing' andthe 'gazed upon: Instead, one must begin from a different topology ororganization of space.46 As Derrida explains in a text written on the deathof Roland Barthes:

Roland Barthes looks at us (inside each of us, so that each of us canthen say that Barthes's thought, memory, and friendship concerns onlyus), and we do not do as we please with this look, even though each ofus has it at his disposal, in his own way, according to his own place andhistory. It is within us but it is not ours; we do not have it available tous like a moment or part of our interiority.47

The reason for this dispossession, or this impossibility of the self to completely interiorize and possess the dead; is that the (deceased) other alwaysis installed already in the 'narcissistic structure' or the relationship of theself to itself.48 'In my relationship to myself,' Derrida writes, '[the other] ishere in me before me, stronger or more forceful than 1.'49 The self indeedonly arises through the experience of others or more exactly through theexperience of others who can die and leave us with the responsibility toremember them. What counts for the constitution of the self, accordingto Derrida, also counts for the constitution of the social. It is precisely thedreadful experience of being left alone or the terrible solitude on the deathof another that enables (me, us) to think the notions 'me,' 'us,' 'between us,''subjectivity,' and 'intersubjectivity: It must always be remembered, Derrida argues, that subjective and intersubjective interiority do not arise beforethe terrible experience of death. However, the constitution of the self or thesocial does not necessarily await the 'actual' event of death: It is enoughfor death to be possible or for it to be anticipated. The importance of suchan 'anticipated mourning' clearly manifests itself in the phenomenon of


friendship, which, according to Derrida, is based on the iron-clad law thatone friend will always die before the other and that the one that sees theother die has the responsibility to bury and commemorate this other.50

Although the deceased other thus only lives in me or us, the very notionsof the self and the social are dependent on the mourning of this other-amourning that starts long before the other's 'actual' death. In the words ofDerrida:

[The deceased] lives only in us. But we are never ourselves, and between us, identical to us, a 'self' is never in itself or identical to itself.This specular reflection never closes on itself; it does not appear beforethis possibility of mourning, before and outside this structure of allegory and prosopopeia which constitutes in advance all 'being-in-us,''in-me,' between us, or between ourselves. The selbst, the soi-meme,the self appears to itself only in this bereaved allegory, in this hallucinatory prosopopeia-and even before the death of the other actuallyhappens, as we say, in 'reality:51

Given the fact that mourning is constitutive of the self, Derrida argues, thedead can only possibly be interiorized by 'exceeding,' 'wounding,' or 'fracturing' the very interiority that tries to incorporate them. In addition tobeing constitutive of the self and the social, mourning, thus, also reveals thelimits of the 'me' and the 'us' because the latter are obliged to harbor something that is 'greater and other than them; something outside of them withinthem:52 Consequently, it does not make a lot of sense to speak of interiorityand exteriority in terms of a strict opposition. As Derrida explains:

However narcissistic it may be, our subjective speculation can no longer seize and appropriate this gaze [of the deceased other; in this caseDerrida is referring to Louis Marin] before which we appear at themoment when, bearing it in us, bearing it along with every movementof our bearing or comportment, we can get over our mourning of himonly by getting over our mourning, by getting over, by ourselves, themourning of ourselves, I mean the mourning of our autonomy, of everything that would make us the measure of ourselves. 53

Anticipated mourning and the radical dissymmetry created by the constitutive nature of death, according to Derrida, inscribe an 'essential anachronyin our being exposed to the other'-they come to disintegrate the livingpresent. This brings me to the second deconstruction underlying Derrida'stheory of mourning: that of the classical account of memory.

The question of memory is featured prominently in the work of Derrida. Derrida has often referred to his own intellectual legacy as a struggle against the loss of memory and as an attempt to define, understand,and come to terms with the ethical injunctions that relate to memory. As


IGerhard Richter argues, the central ethico-political impetus underlyingIDerrida's work could be described as a mnemophilia, a love of memory,rather than merely one of philosophia in the original sense of a love ofwisdom. 54 Because it is so central to his philosophical project, it shouldnot surprise that Derrida develops his own interpretation of memory-aninterpretation that is critical of, and differs radically from, most of memory's more common conceptualizations.

Memory, Derrida argues, is all too easily equated with subjective interiorization and with the temporal dimension of the past. In some idioms, theequation of memory and interiorization even is reflected semantically-thisis the case, for example, with the German term Erinnerung. This coupling,however, is not necessary. Derrida refers to Paul de Man's discussion of theanalytic distinction that Hegel made between the notions Erinnerung andGedachtnis. In contrast to the interiorizing and subjective remembrance signified by the term Erinnerung, the word Gedachtnis refers to a 'thinkingmemory' that (partly) depends on external objects or traces, or what Derrida calls technical and mechanical 'hypomnesis.' The concept of Gedachtnisis important because it can help us move beyond an interiorizing memoryor, as Derrida puts it, 'beyond the bereaved interiority of symbolist introjection.' Because it does not necessarily reduce the other to the narcissisticstructure of the self, this notion of memory, according to Derrida, carrieswith it an affirmative potential that offers the possibility of an 'engagementbeyond negativity' and a fidelity that goes beyond the closure or detachmenteffected by the modern work of mourning. As Derrida puts it:

When we say 'in us' or 'between us' to recall ourselves faithfully 'tothe memory of,' of which memory are we speaking, Gedachtnis or Erinnerung? The movement of interiorization keeps within us the life,thought, body, voice, look or soul of the other, but in the form of thosehypomnemata, memoranda, signs or symbols, images or mnesic representations which are only lacunary fragments, detached and dispersed-only 'parts' of the departed other. In turn they are parts of us,included 'in us' in a memory which suddenly seems greater and olderthan us, 'greater,' beyond any quantitative comparisons: sublimelygreater than this other that the memory harbors and guards within it,but also greater with this other, greater than itself, inadequate to itself,pregnant with this other.

And he adds a little further that:

It speaks the other and makes the other speak, but it does so in order tolet the other speak, for the other will have spoken first. 55

Let us, then, turn to Derrida's criticism of the interpretation of memory as'of the past.' In order to understand this criticism, one has to take account


of Derrida's statements about the close relation between memory and theproper name and between the proper name and the notions of 'life' and'death.' What we commonly call someone's life is the moment when thatperson is able to answer to his own name. Death, in contrast, according toDerrida, could be defined in Levinasian terms as a form of non-response. Itis the moment of which we know that the person himself, the bearer of thename, will never again be able to answer to or in his name. However, theproper name itself remains after the death has taken place, and through itwe can continue to name, invoke, and designate its bearer. Memory, then,Derrida argues, is exactly this: 'It is the name of what for us (an "us" thatI define only in this way) preserves an essential and necessary relation withthe possibility of the name, and of what in the name assures preservation.'56Memory and the (proper) name cannot be separated: On the one hand, therelation between memory and the remembered object can always be anaIyzed as the relation between the name and the named; on the other hand,the naming of the name closely resembles the structure of an act of commemoration. To cite Derrida:

The name, or what can be considered as such, as having the functionor power of the name-this is the sole object and sole possibility ofmemory, and in truth the only 'thing' that it can at the same timeboth name and think. This means then that any name, any nominalfunction, is 'in memory of'-from the first 'present' of its appearance,and finally, is 'in virtually-bereaved memory of' even during the lifeof its bearerY

Just like our mourning of friends does not await their 'actual' death, thememorializing features of the name do not only manifest themselves afterthe bearer of the proper name has deceased. To the contrary, the name is inadvance and from the first time on 'in memory of.' As Derrida explains:

And since the possibility of this situation [in which the name continuesto name its bearer even if the latter can no longer respond to it] is revealed at death, we can infer that it does not wait for death, or that init death does not wait for death. In calling or naming someone while heis alive, we know that his name can survive him and already surviveshim; the name begins during his life to get along without him, speakingand bearing his death each time it is pronounced in naming or calling,each time it is inscribed in a list, or a civil registry, or a signature. 58

Derrida, therefore, claims that instead of referring exclusively to the past orto deceased persons, memory is determining our intersubjective relationswith living others in the present. Memory is, indeed, constitutive of thesocial and of the living present. Consequently, Derrida comes to the conclusion that it makes no sense to claim that memory is essentially oriented


toward the past. Although memory attempts to 'preserve' traces, thesetraces, according to Derrida, are not necessarily referring to the past-atleast not to a past defined as a continuum of past presents-and he statesthat memory can be 'of the present' and even-to the extent that it anticipates the death that is to come-of the future as well.59

Measuring the Time of Death

Now that I have discussed Derrida's theory of mourning in relation tohis deconstruction of subjective interiority and of the classical account ofmemory, we finally can proceed to a discussion of the former's relation tothe notions of historical time and spectrality. Derrida briefly but explicitlytreats the relation among mourning, time, and spectrality in a lecture titled'The Time Is Out of Joint,' which he presented at a conference in New Yorkshortly after he wrote Specters of Marx. 60 In this lecture, Derrida confessesthat he became aware too late that the central subject of Specters of Marxwas in fact that of mourning or, more specifically, that of the 'dis- or anachrony of mourning.' He had not noticed that Hamlet's famous expression'the time is out of joint' secretly resonates with the 'essential pathology ofmourning.'61

That the time is out of joint, Derrida argues, is clearly reflected by thefact that nobody in Hamlet's entourage can agree about the time or dateof his father's death-or as Derrida puts it, 'about the time that separatespresent speech from this event'62-although the event plays a key role in theplay. Derrida remarks that, although, or maybe because, the usurping Kingexhorts Hamlet to put an end or a term to his mourning, Hamlet throughout the play continues to attach other dates to the death of his father andthus to the commencement of his mourning. Although it is the true subjectof the drama, none of Shakespeare's protagonists can agree about the 'timeof mourning.'

The analysis of this enigma in Shakespeare's play is informative, Derridaargues, because it helps us to recognize the strange chronological paradoxat the core of the economy of mourning. As he remarks, successful or 'normal' mourning presumes knowledge of the date: 'One must indeed knowwhen: at what instant mourning began. One must indeed know at whatmoment death took place, really took place.'63 It is commonly taken forgranted that mourning, at least its finiteness, depends on the passing oftime. According to Derrida, however, this relation of dependence has to beturned around: Instead of conditioning the work of mourning, time itselfis dependent on mourning. Yet this time of mourning (and Derrida rhetorically asks whether there is any time that is not a time of mourning?) is nota linear time that passes chronologically. Rather it raises the essential andrelated questions of the date and of the 'eventness' of the event.

Because mourning, as Derrida has argued, starts long before 'actual'or 'physical' death takes place, and because mourning relates to a type of


memory that can relate to the present or to the future as much as to thepast, the time of mourning puts into question the possibility of ascribing aprecise time to the occurrence of death or even the eventness of death. AsDerrida explains:

One must stop believing that the dead are just the departed and thatthe departed do nothing. One has to stop pretending to know whatis meant by 'to die' and especially by 'dying.' One has, then, to talkabout spectrality. You know very well who pronounces the sentence'The time is out of joint:' Hamlet, the heir of a specter concerningwhich no one knows any longer at what moment and therefore if deathhas happened to him. 64

In other words, it can be seen that Derrida's theory of mourning in theend comes back to his repeated claims about the inadequacy of any dating based on chronological systems such as the calendar or the timetable.Derrida wants to make it clear, for once and for all, that the date, ratherthan standing for an objective reference to an external reality, comes intoexistence precisely at the juncture of the 'material' and the 'psychic.'

CONCLUSION

Without daring to propose a causal hierarchy, I think it should be clearthat a close relationship exists between the way we think about time andhistoricity, on the one hand, and the way we think about mourning anddeath, on the other hand. Modern discourses on mourning resonate andreinforce modern discourses on history and the other way around. Thecore axioms of non-modern accounts of mourning and death (includingthe belief in spirits and the notion of death as a process), in contrast,reflect a concept of historicity that is evidently not based on an irreversible time that automatically creates a temporal distance between pastand present. However, the comparison between modern and non-modernmourning also reveals how difficult it is for Western academics to breakwith the irreversible time of history without becoming 'enchanted.' Theanalysis of differing concepts of mourning and death indirectly shows usthe many difficulties that must be tackled when we attempt to understandthe irrevocable. First, it can be asked what kind of existence the irrevocable has. Does it really exist in itself or is it dependent on us living in thepresent? Second, it can also be asked whether the irrevocable has any kindof agency and/or whether it is solely a product of human memory. Could itindeed not simply be argued that the past that persists is nothing else thanwhat we commonly call memory?

Many of these questions are raised by Jacques Derrida. Historians andphilosophers of history can learn a lot from the way Derrida proceeds in


tackling the problem of 'survival.' In his theories of mourning and spectrality, Derrida uses the same intellectual 'technique': Instead of focusing on'death' or 'the past' directly, he deconstructs our notions of 'life' and the'present.' By making this detour, Derrida succeeds in questioning some ofour most fundamental axioms about history and time without becomingentangled in an irrational discourse. The answers that Derrida providesto the question about the mode of being of the dead equally apply to themode of being of the irrevocable past, and the answers are straightforward:The dead and the irrevocable past cannot exist in themselves and for themselves; rather, they exist 'in us' and in our 'memory' (in the broadest senseincluding both Erinnerung and Gedachtnis). These answers might come asa disappointment to readers who expected a more substantial or 'agentic'concept of the haunting past. However, one has to weigh up the status ofthe dead and of the irrevocable past to that of the living and of the present.Before one considers the memory-based mode of being of the dead or theirrevocable an inferior form of existence, one should take notice of Derrida's argument that relations between the living in the present itself arealso always partly mediated by memory. The difference between the modeof being of the irrevocable past and that of the present should therefore notbe overestimated. Or to put it differently, trivializing the existence of theirrevocable past only can be done at the cost of trivializing a crucial dimension of the present.

Moreover, Derrida rightly remarks that we should rethink the idea ofinteriority that often is associated with memory. Of course the irrevocablecan exist only 'in me' or 'in us,' but that 'me' and that 'us' should not beconsidered pure interiorities. As Derrida demonstrates, the 'me' and the'us' are constituted by the dead or the irrevocable past at least as much asthey 'contain' them. Derrida's approach is valuable because it makes us seethe close relationship between historicity and sociality. It is indeed only byreflecting on sociality that one can rethink the concept of historicity in sucha way that it enables us to take seriously the irrevocable. Only by rethinkingthe social can the problem of the locus and the modus of the irrevocable besolved. Rather than being reducible to the commonsense notion of memory,the irrevocable obliges us to rethink this concept of memory; away from thedichotomies of the interior and the exterior, of the individual and the collective, and of the present and the past.

Another interesting aspect of Derrida's theory of mourning is found inhis claim that instead of conditioning the work of mourning, time itselfis dependent on mourning. By showing how different practices of mourning produce different notions of time, Derrida can help us historicize andcontextualize concepts of (historical) time. If it is possible to approachhistory as a practice of mourning in the broader sense of the word, Derrida's remarks can contribute to a better insight into history's performativity and its participation in the politics of time. At the same time, his

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perspective also helps explain how the existence of non-modern practicesof mourning or, worse, the refusal to mourn can threaten the linear orchronological sense of time. This, I think, is how we have to interpret theMadres' claim that although more than thirty years of calendar time havepassed since their children were disappeared, they do not consider themto belong to the past.

Conclusion

To deny eternity, to suppose the vast annihilation of the yearsfreighted with cities, rivers, and jubilations, is not less incredible thanto imagine their total salvation.

J. L. Barges 1

I started this book by referring to the age-old discussion on the proper temporal orientation of ethics and justice: Should we strive for a form of justicethat focuses on the crimes of the past or should we rather focus on doingjustice and pursuing the good in the present? How one deals with this ethical question is deeply influenced by the way one conceives of the past and thepresent and by the way one thinks of them in ontological terms. In modernWestern thought, I argued, the relationship between history and justice isstrongly determined by the widespread assumption that the past is absentor distant. As a result of this assumption, history's ability to contribute tojustice often is presumed to be minimal. The relationship between time andjustice can be observed clearly when one contrasts the concept of time commonly used in historical discourse with the notion of time often implied inthe discourse of (more traditional forms of) jurisdiction. The traditional discourse of jurisdiction with its logic of guilt and punishment generally workswith a reversible time in which crimes can be annulled or redressed as if theywere still fully present. In contrast to the 'time of jurisdiction,' the prevalent 'time of history' is an irreversible time that stresses the always alreadyabsent or distant character of crimes that happened in the past. This time ofhistory is surely right to criticize the quasi-economical logic that underliesthe ideally reversible time of jurisdiction. However, it can be argued that thetime of history in its turn overstates the absence or distance of the past andin that way contributes to a logic that can facilitate the reign of impunity.

In order to demonstrate the potentially unethical effects of discoursesof history, I chose to focus on a context in which these discourses are soto speak 'put into practice': the relatively recent phenomenon of the truthcommission that has arisen in many countries around the world as a newformula to deal with the dilemmas of transitional justice. As semi-judicialbodies, truth commissions cannot punish or convict but instead offer truthtelling as an alternative. Although these commissions occasionally function as a preparation in the quest for (criminal) justice (as it was the casewith the CONADEP in Argentina), they are most often combined with anamnesty arrangement of some sort and generally function as an alternative(as it was the case in South Africa) or at best a complement (as in Sierra

Conclusion 169

Leone) to traditional jurisdiction. Therefore, the formula of the truth commission can be interpreted as the introduction of the time of history into acontext that generally would be considered to belong to the sphere of thetime of jurisdiction. This applies to all three cases but is most poignantin the case of Sierra Leone. There the truth commission's concept of timeclashed with the notion of time used by the war tribunal, operating in thesame period.

Although I do not want to minimize the importance of historical truthor of the official acknowledgment of this truth, I argue that the truth commissions' turn to history should primarily be seen as part of a 'politicstime.' As I wrote in the Introduction, the turn to history must be interpreted in the context of a 'fragile modernity' in which the typically modernist belief in a strict delimitation or divide between past and present isthreatened (if it ever existed) by an overabundant memory of offense thatresists chronology. It is from this perspective that one has to approach whatI have called historical discourse's 'performativity.' More than merely beingdescriptive or analytical, discourses on history tend to produce significantsocio-political effects. In the field of transitional justice, this performativitymanifests itself as a tendency to restore or to create a break between pastand present by reenforcing or imposing a sense of temporal 'distance,' butoccasionally it also turns into an 'allochronistic' practice that symbolicallyallocates people in time and stamps them as living anachronisms. Think ofSouth Africa and Sierra Leone, where the constant stress on the 'newness'of the nation tended to go hand in hand with the exclusion of particular victims whose struggle soon came to be associated with the past or the 'old.'Both phenomena (historical discourses' performativity and allochronisticpotential) did not yet receive the scholarly attention they deserve. It wouldbe interesting to look for them in other social realms beyond the sphere oftruth commissions and transitional justice.

The truth commissions' turn to history has not remained uncontested.As I have tried to show, a considerable amount of resistance to the work orlegacy of the truth commissions can be found in each of the three cases thatI studied. Although this resistance revolves around diverging or even opposite motives in the different cases, it is always strikingly directed againstthe irreversible time of history. Although the Madres de Plaza de Mayoin Argentina and the Khulumani Support Group in South Africa first andforemost reject irreversible historical time because they fear that this willfacilitate impunity, large parts of the (rural) population in Sierra Leone, incontrast, refuse to testify to the truth commission for fear of awakening orconjuring up the ghosts of the past. All of these groups, however, reject theabsence or distance of the past and claim that it persists in the presentwhether they do so by developing a spectral language or by straightforwardly declaring that 'the past is in the present.'

In order to take seriously these widespread and often repeated claimsabout the persistence of the past, I introduced the notion of an irrevocable


past that cannot be undone but does persist into the present and thus canprovide a point of departure for the development of a chronosophy thatfunctions as an alternative to both the irreversible time of history as wellas to the reversible time of jurisdiction. Sometimes the truth commissions'use of historical discourse and their celebration of the healing powers oftelling the truth about history is accompanied by an explicit or at leastimplicit recognition of the irrevocable-much like the performance of aritual of exorcism implies a certain recognition of the problem of haunting.Yet the truth commissions' practical recognition of the irrevocable sharplycontrasts with the great difficulty of taking seriously or formally recognizing the latter phenomenon in the historiographical accounts they establishin their reports. On this issue, the commissions could not expect muchaid from academic historiography, which generally is equally incapable ofacknowledging or even seeing the reality of the irrevocable past, whichit commonly treats as merely metaphorical or as the product of the hallucinatory ideas of traumatized victims. This inability to acknowledge theirrevocable, in its turn, makes it difficult to recognize the phenomenon ofhistorical performativity. As I argued in Chapter 5, both intellectual problems can be related to a series of chronosophic features that are widespreadin academic historiography and broader historical thinking in the West-Ifocused on the use of absolute, empty, and homogenous time and the phenomena of historicism, modernism, and secularism-which taken togetherturn the idea of a persistent past into a logical inconsistency. Therefore,I considered it necessary to break with the chronosophy made up by theabove elements and criticize it as including an admittedly ingenious way ofnot seeing.

Of course, breaking with this prevailing chronosophy is difficult because,as I admitted, its historical construction was a major intellectual achievement that has been central to modern historical thinking. Nevertheless,as I have tried to demonstrate, the first steps toward such a break andtoward an alternative chronosophy can be found in thinkers such as Braudel, Collingwood, Bloch, and Althusser. In the work of Fernand Braudel,we encountered an intuitive and admittedly incomplete reaction of a prominent historian against the tendency to allow for only one singular notionof time. R. G. Collingwood offered a much more philosophically groundedcritique of the inclination to treat historical reality in terms of mere chronological sequence. The Marxist analyses of Ernst Bloch and Louis Althusserrevealed how the assumption about the existence of a singular, contemporaneous historical present reflects a particular vision of social reality that isfar from politically neutral.

The most elaborate and promising contribution toward a new chronosophy that should enable us to think the irrevocable I have found in the workof Jacques Derrida. Derrida has never been the favorite philosopher of mosthistorians. Given his criticism of commonsense notions of history, but alsogiven his often enigmatic style of writing and the high level of abstraction

Conclusion 171

of his work, it is unlikely that he ever will be. Nevertheless, if one considers the extensive attention he gives to several of the most central themesof current debates on history and memory, it should be clear that we cannot afford to simply ignore him. Derrida's philosophical work and, morespecifically, his life-long criticism of the metaphysics of presence and themetaphysical concept of time can be of great value for all those who wantto rethink historical discourse in order to make it more inclusive. Derridaraises many of the questions surrounding the phenomenon of the irrevocable. Although it would be intellectually imprudent to declare that he provides final answers, I think it can safely be said that his work can point usin the right direction.

Derrida helps us to see how both the time of history and the time ofjurisdiction are in fact engaged in one and the same metaphysical logicof presence. This logic posits the absent past as the modified presence ofa past 'present' and thereby at once posits the ontological inferiority ofthat past. Moreover, Derrida teaches us that in order to understand thehaunting past, we should not begin by looking at the nature and characteristics of that past itself but should, rather, focus on the nature and constitution of the present. The intellectual detour of reflecting on the 'presence ofthe present' and of rethinking the concept of historical time is importantbecause it is the only way to avoid becoming mystical when writing aboutthe persistence of the past.

Most of the mysticism surrounding the notion of the haunting past originates in the tendency to ascribe a full presence (the metaphysical oppositeof absence) to this past or to attribute to it some kind of agency-e.g. thebelief that it can return on its own strength. However, once the idea of anabsolutely synchronic present is deconstructed, past and present, indeed, nolonger have to be conceived as primordial categories or as mutually exclusive. By arguing that time is 'out of joint' and by demonstrating the 'noncontemporaneity of the present with itself,' Derrida enables us to reflect onthe persistence of the irrevocable past without obliging us to ascribe anyagency to it or conceive of it as something that has the strength to return onits own. Instead of attributing all kinds of mystical powers to the past, Derrida teaches us to focus on the frailty of the present or, better, of the 'presence of the present.'2 As was pointed out in the chapter on Derrida's theoryof spectrality, the haunting past should be seen as something that (due to theeffects of differance) was never present enough to suddenly become absent.Or to relate it to an example taken from one of our case studies, the factthat Apartheid still haunts South Africa long after the date on which it wasofficially declared past and over is not due to some kind of mystical powerbut, rather, must be related to the fact that it was never completely presenteven in the days when it was firmly considered to be so by both its enemiesand its supporters. Apartheid always partly had to be represented or 'madepresent' in order to be related to, or acted on-whether to be defended orresisted. It indeed could never be reduced to a pure presence that could be


encountered at one point in time and space. It is precisely these elementsthat were never fully present, or were always in need of representation, thatdo not easily become absent when Apartheid is formally removed.

Although this characterization of the ambiguous 'presence'-or, better,in Derrida's terms, the 'non-presence'-of the irrevocable past might at firstsight seem to be insubstantial, its significance has to be evaluated in relationto the imperfect presence of the historical present. It is indeed because ofthe incomplete presence of the present that the irrevocable past can retainits 'non-presence.' The 'mode of being' of the past is thus not as radicallydifferent from the 'mode of being' of the present as it often is believed to be;that, I think, is the most important lesson that we can learn from Derrida'sclosely related deconstructions of the synchronic present and the broadermetaphysics of presence.

This lesson should not be restricted to matters of ontology: It equallyapplies to epistemological questions. Although I did not focus on the question of epistemology, it is hard to deny that the project of rejecting the absolute absence of the past (and its mirror image of the absolute presence of thepresent) has epistemological implications. As Paul Ricoeur has argued, thelong tradition of epistemological reflection on problems of historical representation and on the entanglement of historiography and fiction ultimatelyis grounded in the idea that the writing of history is a difficult exercise indifferentiation between 'the image of the absent as unreal' and 'the imageof the absent as prior.'3 This obviously changes when the past turns out notto be the absolute absence that it generally is supposed to be. However, Ido not want to seize on the ambiguous 'presence' of the irrevocable pastin order to dodge or deny the profound epistemological problems that, asmany prominent philosophers of history have claimed, relate to historicalrepresentation. Rather I think it is necessary to combine the scrutiny ofthese epistemological problems with a thorough reflection on our ontological commitments. From this perspective, I would like to question theassumption that these epistemological problems are unique or even typicalfor the representation of the past. In the context of Derrida's claims aboutthe importance of memory and representation in the relations between theliving in the present, it could be argued that, as much as in the field of ontology, in the realm of epistemology too the difference between the temporaldimensions of the present and those of the past is all too often overrated.

Having said this, however, it is important to remind of the distinctionbetween the notion of absence and that of loss as it was discussed in theprevious chapter. This distinction is crucial for at least two reasons. First,it provides an answer to the question of whether the denial of the absenceof certain pasts or certain parts of the past does not amount to a kind ofanti-realism. Yet my defense of the irrevocable past does not compel meto engage in an anti-realist position because, although I deny the absenceof certain parts of the past, I, of course, do not deny the undeniable reality of historical loss and historical change. Loss is very real, and without

Conclusion 173

a preoccupation with its reality I would not have started reflecting on theirrevocable experience of time in the first place. Keeping in mind the difference between loss and absence is, indeed, of importance when approachingthe alternative notions of time and history that I discussed in the case studies on Argentina, South Africa, and Sierra Leone. Although victims andsurvivors often deny the absence of the past, they of course do not deny theloss that they suffered, and that is the very phenomenon that turned theminto victims or survivors. Second, the distinction between absence and losscan provide an answer to the question of whether the irrevocable past actually can be called a past if it persists into the present. This question aboutthe 'pastness' of the irrevocable is a tricky one. Here everything dependson the way in which one defines the notion of past. Of course, the irrevocable cannot be called a past if the latter notion is defined as 'that what hasbecome absent' or 'that which is distancing itself from present.' Neithercan the irrevocable be called past in the sense of being 'passed' or 'passe'that, as Frans;ois Hartog remarked, often is attached to it in the dominantmodern regime of historicity. However, the irrevocable can be called a pastif the past is defined in a broader and more neutral sense as 'that which isexperienced as lost'-irrespective of the question of whether this loss isconsidered a tragic or a welcome thing.

Furthermore, it seems good to add a disclaimer about the issue of chronology. Would I like to give up on the system of chronological ordering thatis so essential to historians? No, of course not. It cannot be denied that themodern chronological dating system is a very important intellectual construction that is especially successful in dealing with historical events andthat can contribute immensely to developing critical insights into historicalchange. Moreover, even if one decides to break with a Newtonian notion ofabsolute time, it will always be possible to choose a certain reference timetake a time expressed in terms of the number earthly rotations aroundthe sun-and organize a chronological ordering around it. The questionremains, however, how this reference time relevantly relates to the manydifferent spheres of social and cultural reality. It has to be pointed out thatchronological reasoning is a pretty limited way of approaching historicalreality that is incapable of grasping historicity in its full complexity. How,for example to apply a chronological perspective to the Madres' disturbing claim that the disappearance of their children remains more proximateor retains more 'presence' than any other event in the thirty years of theirstruggle to obtain justice for the injustices they suffered.

Finally, let me return to the issue of the relationship between time andethics with which I opened this book. One central question remains: Canwe decide on the transitional justice dilemma now that we have criticizedthe irreversible time of history and claimed the existence of the irrevocable?No, unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) the simple recognition of thenon-contemporaneity of the living present and the spectral survival of thepast does not deliver us a direct solution to the dilemma of the proper


temporal orientation of ethics. Here I want to take some critical distancefrom Derrida's position and the theory of justice that comes with his accountof spectrality. Ernesto Laclau is right when he critically remarks that onecannot legitimately make the logical transition from an argument aboutthe disadjustment of time and a (post-)ontological claim about specters toa binding ethical injunction to be responsible to them.4 By theorizing theexistence of an irrevocable past, I thus do not want to claim that societies emerging from a period of violent conflict have to bring justice to thevictims and survivors of historical injustices irrespective of the costs thatthis action could potentially bring with it. Deciding how exactly to dealwith the past after political transition and/or violent conflict will remaina socio-political issue that cannot be solved a priori or out of context, andone can imagine contexts where the 'beast of the past' is just too powerfulor threatening to be dealt with or, in Desmond Tutu's words, to be 'lookedinto the eye.' One should be equally reticent toward the difficult questionon the proper balance between remembrance and forgetting. The issue ofa possible 'surfeit' of memory should not be ignored. Also I agree withTzvetan Todorov when he claims that the 'sacralization' of memory and thehabit of 'unconditionally praising memory and discrediting forgetting' areproblematical.5 However, by reformulating the issues of remembrance andforgetting in terms of the differing concepts of time they imply, I have triedto point out the thoroughly political nature of this matter. To a large extent,the conflict between remembering and forgetting involves the undecidablepolitical question of how to relate the temporal dimensions of past andpresent. The focus on these politics of time enables us to move beyond theidea of an absolute opposition between remembering and forgetting by distinguishing between radically different forms of remembrance. In the casesI discussed in this book, for example, the difference between the notion ofremembrance defended by victim groups and the notion of remembranceimplied in the discourse of truth commissions was so vast that at times itseemed to render the opposition between remembrance and forgetting ofonly minor relevance.

Again I agree with Ernesto Laclau when he remarks that the ethicalsignificance of Derridean deconstruction 'is that by enlarging the area ofstructural undecidability it enlarges also the area of responsibility-thatis, of the decision.'6 Although the deconstruction of presence cannot helpus decide on the transitional justice dilemma or on the proper temporalorientation of ethics in general, the recognition of the irrevocable pastdoes unmask the false premises from which discussions of historical justiceall too often start out. First, by theorizing the persistence or ambiguous'presence' of the past and criticizing the overrated ontological differencebetween the temporal dimensions of past and present, the concept of theirrevocable gets rid of the presumed ontological inferiority of the past thatdetermines the unequal relation between the preoccupation with historicalinjustice, on the one hand, and ethical values directed at the present and the

Conclusion 175

future, on the other hand. This way one can resist the exoteric Nietzscheanargumentation that presents a false choice between a living present and adead and absent past and that, as we have seen, often is used by perpetrators of historical injustices to escape accountability. Second, although thepast is inalterable and cannot be affected in a causal way, we can developa meaningful ethical relation with it. The notion of the irrevocable pastand the related deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence enable us toreevaluate WaIter Benjamin's 'anamnestic solidarity' without needing themysticism often related to it. In this way, the concept of the irrevocablereveals its ethical and political potential by leaving the transitional justicedilemma the way it should be left: as a political dilemma.

Notes

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

1. Adorno T., The Meaning of Working Through the Past. In Critical Models. Interventions and Catchwords. New York, Columbia University Press,1998, pp. 89-104.

2. Benjamin W., The Meaning of Time in the Moral Universe. In Bullock M.& Jennings M. W., Selected Writings, 1913-1926 (Volume I). Cambridge(Mass.), Harvard University Press, 2002, pp. 286-287.

3. Nietzsche F., On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life. In BreazealeD., Untimely Meditations. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997,pp. 57-124.

4. Benjamin W., Theses on the Philosophy of History. In Arendt H., Illuminations. New York, Harcourt Brace Janovitch, 1968, pp. 253-264.

5. The term 'anamnestic solidarity' was in fact post-humously attributed toBenjamin's philosophy by Christian Lenhardt: Lenhardt c., AnamnesticSolidarity. The Proletariat and Its Manes. In Telos, 25 (1975), pp. 133-154.

6. I do not deny the important differences between the conceptualization of thepast as 'absent' and the conceptualization of the past as 'distant.' However,in the context of my argument, these differences are not so relevant. Boththe 'absent past' and the 'distant past' are in the first place defined as 'notpresent,' and consequently their ontological status is considered inferior or'derivative' to that of the present.

7. See for example: Jenkins K., Why Bother with the Past? Engaging with SomeIssues Raised by the Possible 'End of History as 'We Have Known It: InRethinking History, 1 (1997),1, pp. 56-66.

8. The idea that the past as history can be demanding is discussed in Bennington G., Demanding History. In Attridge D., Bennington G., & Young R.,Post-Structuralism and the Question of History. Cambridge, CambridgeUniversity Press, 1987, pp. 15-29.

9. Rousso H., The Haunting Past. History, Memory, and Justice in Contemporary France. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002, p. 30.

10. Horkheimer M., Thoughts on Religion. In Critical Theory. Selected Essays.New York, Herder and Herder, 1972, pp. 179-180.

11. From a letter to Benjamin (1937). Cited in Peukert H., Science, Action, andFundamental Theology. Cambridge (Mass.), MIT Press, 1984, pp. 206207.

12. Caputo J. D., No Tears Shall Be Lost. In Carr D., Flynn T. R., & MakkreelR., The Ethics of History. Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 2004,pp. 91-117.

178 Notes

13. Throughout this work, I will use the term 'persistence' to refer to the ambiguous 'presence' of the haunting past because this term is generally taken to bemetaphysically neutral. This way I can evade the, in my opinion, unfruitful,metaphysical discussions on the distinction between 'endurance' and 'perduranee' as two different concepts of how things persist through time. To putit very simply, defendants of the perdurance thesis claim that things persistin virtue of having temporal parts in addition to spatial ones. Defendants ofthe endurance thesis, in contrast, posit that objects are wholly present at alltimes at which they exist and, as such, move through time. See McKinnonN., The Endurance/Perdurance Distinction. In Australasian Joumal of Philosophy, 80 (2002), 3, pp. 288-306.

14. Amery J., At the Mind's Limits. Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitzand Its Realities. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1980, p. 68.

15. Ibid., 72.16. Jankelevitch v., L'irrl!versible et la nostalgie. Paris, Flammarion, 1974.17. Ibid., pp. 211-212.18. For an interesting discussion of the concept of path dependence-'! ... ] that

what has happened at an earlier point in time will affect the possible outcomes of a sequence of events occurring at a later point in time'-see SewellW. H., Jr., Logics of History. Social Theory and Social Transformation. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2005, pp. 100-101.

19. The practice of writing contemporary history, of course, goes back at least tothe Hellenic world. However, as Charles Maier writes, during the early daysof the rise of 'professional history,' the writing of contemporary history wasoften dismissed as an impossible and unscientific enterprise that had to beleft to amateurs. The rise of professional contemporary history as we knowit today started in the decades following the Second World War. Maier C.S., Contemporary History. In Smelser N. J. & Balthes P. B., InternationalEncyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences. Oxford, Pergamon Press,2001,pp.2690-269~

20. Lorenz Ch., Beyond Good and Evil? The German Empire of 1871 and Modern German Historiography. InJoumal ofContemporary History, 30 (1995),4, pp. 729-765, 729.

21. Teitel R. G., Transitional Justice Genealogy. In Harvard Human Rights JourItal, 16 (2003), pp. 69-94,69.

22. Elster J., Closing the Books. Transitional Justice in Historical Perspective.Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004.

23. Teitel, Transitional Justice Genealogy, p. 70.24. For a critique of this assumption that equates any transition away from dic

tatorship with a movement toward democracy, see Carothers T., The End ofthe Transition Paradigm. In Journal of Democracy, 13 (2002), 1, pp. 5-21.

25. Expressions from Mendez J. E., In Defense of Transitional Justice. In McAdams A. J., Transitional Justice and the Rule of Law in New Democracies.Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1997, pp. 1-26, 1. Teitel R.G., Transitional Justice. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000, p. vii.

26. For a standard work on transitional justice, see the three-volume TransitionalJustice. How Emerging Democracies Reckon with Former Regimes, edited byNeil J. Kritz for the United States Institute of Peace (Washington, 1995).

Also see the websites of the United States Institute of Peace (http://www.usip.org/) and the International Center for Transitional Justice (http://www.ictj.org/enltjl).

27. Zalaquett J., Balancing Ethical Imperatives and Political Constraints. TheDilemma of New Democracies Confronting Past Human Rights Violations.In Hastings Law Journal, 43 (1992), pp. 1425-1438.

Notes 179

28. Boraine A, Transitional Justice. In Villa-Vicencio C. & Doxtader E., Piecesof the Puzzle. Keywords on Reconciliation and Transitional Justice. CapeTown, Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, 2004, pp. 67-72, 72.

29. Expression from Huyse L., YOUltg Democracies and the Choice BetweenAmnesty, Truth Commissions and Prosecutions. Leuven, Instituut Recht enSamenleving, 1998, pp. 11-12.

30. See for example, Zalaquett, Balancing Ethical Imperatives and PoliticalConstraints. Kritz N. J., The Dilemmas of Transitional Justice. In Kritz N.J., Transitional Justice. How Emerging Democracies Reckon with FormerRegimes. Volume I: General Considerations. Washington, United StatesInstitute of Peace Press, 1995, pp. xix-xxx.

31. Mendez, In Defense of Transitional Justice, p. 1.32. Biggar N., Making Peace or Doing Justice. Must We Choose? In Biggar N.,

Burying the Past. Making Peace and Doing Justice after Civil Conflict.Washington, DC, Georgetown University Press, 2001, pp. 6-22.

33. Cited in De Greiff P., The Duty to Remember. The Dead Weight of the Past,or the Weight of the Dead of the Past? Paper presented at ILAS on 7 February2002.

34. Cited in Braude C., The Archbishop, the Private Detective and the Angel ofHistory. The Production of Public Memory and the Truth and ReconciliationCommission. In Current Writing, 8 (1996), 2, pp. 39-65,57.

35. Elshtain J. B., Politics and Forgiveness. In Biggar, Burying the Past, pp.40-56,43.

The political theorist Achille Mbembe claims that state building first andforemost rests on an act of 'chronophagy.' 'More than on its ability to recall,the power of the state rests on its ability to consume time, that is, to abolishthe archive and anaesthetise the past.' Mbembe A., The Power of the Archiveand its Limits. In Hamilton C. et al., Refiguring the Archive. Dordrecht,Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002, pp. 19-26,23.

36. Ackerman B., The Future of the Liberal Revolution. New Haven, Yale Uni-versity Press, 1992, pp. 72-73.

37. Ibid., p. 81.38. Ibid., p. 98.39. Huyse L., Introduction. Tradition-based Approaches in Peacemaking, Tran

sitional Justice and Reconciliation Policies. In Huyse L. & Salter M., Traditional Justice and Reconciliation after Violent Conflict. Learning fromAfrican Experiences. Stockholm, International IDEA, 2008, pp. 1-24,2.

40. Nino C. S., Radical Evil on Trial. New Haven, Yal~ University Press, 1996,p. viii.

41. Veitch S., The Legal Politics of Amnesty. In Christodoulidis E. & Veitch S.,Lethe's Law. Justice, Law and Ethics ill Reconciliation. Oregon, Hart Publishing, 2001, pp. 32-45, 33.

42. Garton Ash T., The Truth about Dictatorship. In The New York Review ofBooks, 45 (1998),3, pp. 35-40.

43. Veitch, The Legal Politics of Amnesty, pp. 33-45.44. Forsberg T., The Philosophy and Practice of Dealing with the Past. Some Con

ceptual and Normative Issues. In Biggar, Burying the Past, pp. 65-84, 58.45. Mendez, In Defense of Transitional Justice, p. 4.46. Twenty-one of these truth commissions are analyzed by Priscilla Hayner

in her reference work, Unspeakable Truths. Confronting State Terror andAtrocity. New York, Routledge, 2001. A shorter analysis of 15 truth commissions is found in Hayner P. B., Fifteen Truth Commissions 1974-1994. AComparative Study. In Human Rights Quarterly, 16 (1994),4, pp. 597-655.The following overview is largely based on these two works by Hayner.

180 Notes

47. Roht-Arriaza N., The new landscape of transitional justice. In Roht-ArriazaN. & Mariezcurrena )., Transitional Justice in the Twenty-First Century.Beyond Truth versus Justice. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006,pp. 1-16,5.

48. Freeman M., Truth Commissions and Procedural Fairness. Cambridge,Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 11.

49. This idea was in fact already partly developed in the 'Comisi6n Nacionalpara la Verdad y Reconciliaci6n' that was active in Chile between 1990 and1991. Zalaquett, Balancing Ethical Imperatives and Political Constraints, p.1427.

50. Roht-Arriaza, The New Landscape of Transitional Justice, pp. 3-4. Also seePopkin M. & Roht-Arriaza N., Truth as Justice. Investigatory Commissionsin Latin America. In Law and Social Inquiry, 20 (1995), pp. 79-116.

51. Jose Zalaquett in Boraine A., Levy J., & Scheffer R., Dealing with the Past.Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa. Cape Town, IDASA, 1997, p. 13.

52. Expression from Zalaquett J., Introduction to the English edition. In Reportof the Chilean National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation. NotreDame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1993.

53. Huyse L., Alles gaat voorbij, behalve het verleden. Leuven, Van Halewyck,2006, p. 53.

54. For this kind of critique, see, for example, Gutmann A. & Thompson D., TheMoral Foundations of Truth Commissions. In Rotberg R. I. & ThompsonD., Truth IJ. Justice. The Morality of Truth Commissions. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2000, pp. 22-44.

55. For a moral defense of truth commissions, see Du Toit A., The Moral Foundations of the South African TRC Truth as Acknowledgement and Justiceas Recognition. In Rotberg & Thompson, Truth v. Justice, pp. 122-140. Foran analysis of the argumentation used in defence of truth commissions, seeDyzenhaus D., Justifying the Truth and Reconciliation commission. In TheJournal of Political Philosophy, 8 (2000),4, pp. 470-496.

56. For a detailed discussion, see De Baets A., Responsible History. New York,Berghahn Books, 2009, pp. 157-163. Mendez J. E., The Right to Truth.In Joyner C C, Reining in Impunity for International Crimes and Serious Violations of Fundamental Human Rights. Proceedings of the SiracusaConference 17-21 September 1998. Ramonville St.-Agne, Editions Eres,1998.

57. Question of the impunity of perpetrators of human rights violations (civiland political). Final report prepared by Mc. Louis Joinet pursuant to SubCommission decision 1996/19. [26 June 1997]. At: http://www.unhchr.ch/Huridocda/Huridoca.nsfl% 28 Sy mbol %2 9/E. CN.4. Sub.2 .1997. 20.En?Opendocument (accessed 22.07.2007).

58. See, for example, Osiel M., Mass Atrocity Collective Memory and the Law.London, Transaction Publishers, 2000.

59. See, for example, Barkan E., History on the Line. Engaging History. Managing Conflict and Reconciliation. In History Workshop Journal, 59 (2005),pp. 229-236.

60. Teitel, Transitional justice. Teitel R. G., Transitional Historical Justice. InMeyer L. H., Justice in Time. Responding to Historical Injustice. BadenBaden, Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 2004, pp. 209-222.

61. Roht-Arriaza, The New Landscape of Transitional Justice, p. 8.It should be noted that the recent consensus on the benefits of truth telling

and remembrance has never been complete. In 1990, during the democratization of Poland, Prime Minister T:ideusz Mazowiecki defended a politicalamnesia when he stated, 'We draw a thick line between ourselves and the

Notes 181

past.' Cited in Amstutz M. R., The Healing of Nations. The Promise andLimits of Political Forgiveness. Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers,2005, p. 19.

In the aftermath of the bloody 1976-1992 civil war in Mozambique, too,the government urged victims to forgive and forger. Graybill L., Pardon,Punishment, and Amnesia. Three African Post-Conflict Methods. In ThirdWorld Quarterly, 25 (2004), 6, pp. 1117-1130.

62. Definition by Peter Osborne, in Osborne P., The Politics of Time. Modernityand Avant-Garde, New York, Verso, 1995, p. xii.

63. Barkan E., Restitution and Amending Historical Injustices in InternationalMorality. In Torpey J., Politics and the Past. On Repairing Historical Injustices. Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003, pp. 91-102, 100.Barkan E., The Guilt of Nations. Restituting and Negotiating HistoricalInjustices. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000, pp. 329-332.

64. Soyinka W., The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness. Oxford,Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 90. .

65. Olick). K. & Coughlin B., The Politics of Regret. Analytical Frames. In Torpey J., Politics and the Past. On Repairing Historical Injustices. Lanham,Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003, pp. 37-62.

66. Hartog F., Regimes D'historicite. Presentisme et Experiences du Temps.Paris, Seuil, 2003.

67. Expressions are used in Jankelevitch v., Forgiveness. Chicago, University ofChicago Press, 2005.

68. Ibid., p. 1469. Ibid., p. 18.70. Ibid., pp. 16-17.

Jankelevitch also has some doubts about time's capacity to heal all wounds:Time itself, he writes, is not a permanent guarantee against old resentments,and the past does not always fade away without protest.

71. Ignatieff M., Articles of Faith. In Index 0/1 Censorship,S (1996), pp. 110-122.

72. Ibid., p. 121.73. Ibid., p. 121.74. Torpey J., Making Whole What Has Been Smashed. On Reparations Poli

tics. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2006, p. 19.75. Rousso, The Haunting Past.76. Fritzsche P., Specters of History. On Nostalgia, Exile, and Modernity. In The

American Historical Review, 106 (2001), 5, pp. 1587-1618.77. Christie K. & Cribb R., Historical Injustice and Democratic Transition in

Eastern Asia and Northern Europe. Ghosts at the Table ofDemocracy. London, Routledge, 2002.

78. Soyinka, The Burden of Memory, p. 20.79. Torpey, Making Whole What Has Been Smashed, p. 32.80. According to Andreas Huyssen, for example, the 'current obsession with

memory' is directly related to the crisis of the structure of temporality thatunderlies the belief in progress and utopia. Huyssen A., Twilight Memories.Marking Time in a Culture ofAmnesia. New York, Routledge, 1995, p. 9.

81. Levi P., The Drowned and the Saved. New York, Vintage Books, 1989.82. Spiegel G., Memory and History. Liturgical Time and Historical Time. In

History and Theory, 41 (2002),2, pp. 149-162.83. Langer L. L., Admitting the Holocaust. Collected Essays. New York, Oxford

University Press, 1995.The American historian Peter Novick too has referred to the anti-chron

ological features of memory in order to explain the 'unusual chronology' of

182 Notes

holocaust consciousness in the United States. Novick P., The Holocaust inAmerican life. New York, Mariner Books, 2000, p. 4.

84. Halbwachs M., On Collective Memory. Chicago, University of ChicagoPress, 1992.

85. Yerushalmi Y. H., Zakhor. Jewish History and Jewish Memory. Seattle,University of Washington Press, 2002, p. 96.

86. Nora P., Between Memory and History. Les Lieux de Memoire. In Representations, 26 (1989), pp. 7-24, 8.

Memory's tendency to defy chonological reasoning is described mostboldly by Richard Terdiman. He states that 'memory is the present past.'Terdiman R., Present Past. Modernity and the Memory Crisis. Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1993, p. 8.

87. Jelin E., State Repression and the Labors of Memory. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2003, p. 5.

88. See KoseJleck R., Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time. NewYork, Columbia University Press, 2004. De Certeau M., The Writing of History. New York, Columbia University Press, 1988.

89. Gumbrecht H. U., Presence Achieved in Language. In History and Theory,45 (2006), 3, pp. 317-327, 323.

90. Habermas J., Modernity's Consciousness of Time and Its Need for Self-Reassurance. In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Cambridge (Mass.),MIT Press, 1987, pp. 1-22, 5-6.

91. Hans Blumenberg, quoted in Habermas, Modernity's Consciousness ofTime, p. 7.

92. See, for example, Minow M., Between Vengeance and Forgiveness. FacingHistory after Genocide and Mass Violeltce. Boston, Beacon Press, 1998.

93. I will use the term 'rememberance' as the 'neutral' concept that refers to both'memory' and 'history' as different ways of dealing with the past.

94. Habermas, Modernity's Consciousness of Time.95. Phillips M. S., Distance and Historical Representation. In History Workshop

Journal, 57 (2004), pp. 123-141.Phillips remarks that the concept of distance is so central in the practice of

history that it hardly seems distinguishable from the idea of history itself.96. The distinction between constative utterances and performative utterances

was introduced by J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge(Mass.), Harvard University Press, 1962.

97. Anderson B., Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spreadof Nationalism. London, Verso, 2006.

98. Ibid., p. 26.99. Fabian J., Time and the Other. How Anthropology Makes its Object. New

York, Columbia University Press, 1983.100. Evans R. J., Redesigning the Past. History in Political Transitions. In Journal

of Contemporary History, 38 (2003), 1, pp. 5-12, 5.101. Expression from Sylviane Agacinski. Agacinski claims that, 'Through the

techniques by which time is measured and through its assimilation as a market value, we can witness the Western hour's hold over the entire world.'Agacinski S., Time Passing. Modernity and Nostalgia. New York, ColumbiaUniversity Press, 2003, pp. 5-6.

Agacinski's claim is confirmed by several studies that relate the spreadof Western time to the process of colonization. See, for example, Cooper F.,Colonizing Time. Work Rhythms and Labor Conflict in Colonial Mombasa.In Dirks N. B., Colonialism and Culture. Ann Arbor, University of MichiganPress, 1992, pp. 209-245. Giordano N., Around the Clock. The Colonisation of Time in the British World (with a focus on Lovedale, Cape Colony

Notes 183

1870-1905). In, Edmonds P. & Furphy S., Rethinking Colonial Histories.New and Alternative Approaches. Melbourne, RMIT Publishing, 2006, pp.205-218.

102. Jeffrey Olick might be right when he posits a thesis that is seemingly theopposite of Agacinski's (de. Note 101): namely, that since the end of thenineteenth century, there has been a growing differentiation of temporalities, a process he names 'chronic differentiation.' Olick remarks that different temporalities or historicities tend to accumulate rather than displaceone another. According to him, the process of chronic differentiation resultsfrom a process of increasing technological, institutional, and existentialcomplexification of Western societies, which made it impossible for thenation-state to keep up its monopolistic position as the guardian of historiography and of commemoration projects. As Olick explains, 'by the latenineteenth century ordinary people found themselves stretched in differentways by multiple chronic frames: factory time, calendrical time, local time,national time, official time, leisure time, lifetime, public time, private time,family time. By the end of the nineteenth century, the failure of nation-statesto provide existential security and identitarian unity in face of these multiplications seemed to have reached a crisis level.' Olick J. K., The Politics ofRegret. On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility. New York,Routledge, 2007, p. 190.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

1. From a speech of the leader of the second military junta in 1979. (My translation)

2. From a speech held by the president of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo held in1995. (My translation)

3. Vazquez 1. & Downie K., Un pais. 30 aliOS. El patluelo sigue haciendo historia. Buenos Aires, Ediciones Madres de Plaza de Mayo, 2006.

4. Expression from Gordon A. F., Ghostly Matters. Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1997, p.111.

5. Cited in Joyce c. & Stover E., Witnesses from the Grave. The Stories BonesTell. Boston, Little, Brown and Company, 1991, p. 254.

6. Schirmer J. G., Those Who Die for Life Cannot Be Called Dead. Women andHuman Rights Protest in Latin America. In Agosin M., Surviving BeyondFear. Women, Chi/drelt and Human Rights in Latin America. New York,White Pine Press, 1993, p. 52.

7. Ibid., p. 53.Nicole Loraux claims that the task of mourning is traditionally associated

mostly with women. See Loraux N., Mothers in Mourning. With the Essayof Amnesty and Its Opposite. Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1998.

8. It is important to make a distinction between the notion of 'mourning' andthat of 'grief.' Grief is a natural emotion that, as a reaction to loss, is universal.Mourning, in contrast, refers to culturally or socially constructed responsesto loss that manifest many historical and geographical varieties. Whereasgrief is mostly experienced privately by the individual, mourning often isbound to social rules. Grief can be found in some animals such as primates,whereas mourning is considered to be typically human. Thus, although theMadres refuse to fulfill the societal demand for the work of mourning, theydo, of course, grieve for their disappeared children. For a clear discussionof both terms, see Homans P., Symbolic Loss. The Ambiguity of Mourning

184 Notes

and Memory at Century's End. Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia,2000, pp. 1-3.

9. Malin A., Mother Who Won't Disappear. In Human Rights Quarterly, 15(1993), pp. 187-213,207.

By 1985, two years after the reemergence of democracy, 59 percent ofthe Argentine public in a national survey expressed their disapproval of theMadres' activities. Schirmer, Those Who Die for Life Cannot be CalledDead, p. 40.

10. Testimony GracieIa de Jeger in Fisher J., Mothers of the Disappeared. London, South and Press, 1989, p. 128.

11. Femenfa N. A. & Gil C. A., Argentina's Mothers of Plaza de Mayo. TheMourning Process form Junta to Democracy. In Feminist Studies, 13 (1987),pp. 9-18.

12. Suarez-Orosco M. M., The Heritage of Enduring a 'Dirty War.' PsychosocialAspects of Terror in Argentina, 1976-1988. In The Journal of Psychohistory, 18 (1991),4, pp. 469-505, 490.

13. See, for example, Suarez-Orosco, The Heritage of Enduring a 'Dirty War,'pp. 490 and 494.

14. The figure of the desaparecido has of course not only been analyzed in psychosocial terms. Actually, the ghostly nature of the desaparecido recently attractedextensive and wide-ranging scholarly attention. For some interesting discussions, see, Crossland Z., Buried Lives. Forensic Archaeology and the Disappeared in Argentina. In Archaeological Dialogues, 7 (2000), 2, pp. 146-159.Domanska E., Toward the Archaeontology of the Dead Body. In RethinkingHistory, 9 (2005),4, pp. 389--413. Gordon A. E, Ghostly Matters.

15. Expression from Cortazar J., Argentina. Aiios de Alambradas Culturales.Barcelona, Muchnik Editores, 1984, p. 31.

16. CONADEP, Nunca Mds. Informe de la Comision Nacional sobre la Desaparicion de Personas. Buenos Aires, Eudeba, 2006, p. 15.

17. 'Disappearance' as a technique of terror has been typical for the whole ofLatin America. In the mid-1960s, already it was used on a massive scale bythe government of Guatemala. In the 1970s, it further spread to countriessuch as Brazil, Uruguay, and Chile, only to reach a climax in Argentina. Inthe 1980s, massive disappearances occurred in El Salvador, Guatemala, andPeru. An estimated 90,000 cases of disappearance have taken place in LatinAmerica since 1964. See Martos B. B., 'Disappearances.' A Workbook. NewYork, Amnesty International USA, 1981.

18. CONADEP, NUllca Mds, p. 13.19. This is a recent estimate by Human Rights Watch. Reluctant Partner, The

Argentine Government's Failure to Back Trials of Human Rights Violations.In Human Rights Watch, 13 (2001),5.

20. CONADEP, NUllca Mds, p. 13 and pp. 297-394.21. Simpson J. & Bennett J., The Disappeared. Voices from a Secret War. Lon

don, Robson Books Ltd., 1985, p. 152.22. Pion-Berlin D., The Fall of Military Rule in Argentina: 1976-1983. In jour

nal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, 27 (1985), 2, pp. 55-76.23. Garro A. M. & Dahl H., Legal Accountability for Human Rights Violations

in Argentina. One Step Forward and Two Steps Backward. In Human RightsLaw journal, 8 (1987), pp. 283-344, 300.

24. Important decisions on human rights policy in Argentina have almost unilaterally been made by the presidents and their advisers, with only limitedinfluence by the Congress. Osiel M., The Making of Human Rights Policy inArgentina. The Impact of Ideas and Interests on a Legal Conflict. In: journalof Latin American Studies, 18 (1986), 1, pp. 135-180, 143.

Notes 185

25. Osiel, The Making of Human Rights Policy in Argentina, p. 151. Also seeAlfonsfn R., 'Never Again' in Argentina. In journal of Democracy, 4 (1993),1, pp. 15-19.

26. Mignone E., Estlund C. L., & Issacharoff S., Dictatorship on Trial. Prosecution of Human Rights Violations in Argentina. In Yale journal of International Law, 10 (1984), pp. 118-150, 125. Osiel, The Making of HumanRights Policy in Argentina, p. 150.

27. Nino, Radical Evil on Trial, pp. 63-68.28. 'Decreto 157' [13 December 1983]. At: http://www.derechos.org/nizkor/arg/

doclindultos.html (accessed 12.02.2008).29. In addition to the ten commissioners appointed by Alfonsfn, the Chambers of

Congress were each allowed to send three representatives, although only theChamber of deputies did so. CONADEP, Nunca Mas, pp. 447-448.

Although the presidential advisers wanted some representation from humanrights organizations, these organizations at that time were skeptical and refusedto be seated in the commission. Nino, Radical Evil on Trial, p. 73.

30. Jaime Malamud-Goti calls Nunca Mas 'Argentina's brief spring.' MalamudGoti, Game Without End, p. 59.

31. Due to a leak, probably by a member of the CONADEP staff, a list containing the names of the responsible was published a few days later in El Periodista. Nino, Radical Evil on Trial, p. 80.

32. Mignone et aI., Dictatorship on Trial, p. 140.33. Amnesty International, Argentina. The Military Juntas and Human Rights.

Report of the Trial of the Former junta Members, 1985. London, AmnestyInternational Publications, 1987, pp. 18-46.

After the trial, the case subsequently went to the Supreme Court, wherethe convictions were largely upheld with a few modifications. MalamudGoti, Game Without End, p. 63.

34. Amnesty International, Argentina, pp. 53-81.35. Nino, Radical Evil 011 Trial, pp. 92-93. Malamud-Goti, Game Without

End, pp. 64-65.36. Before the imposed cut-off date in February 1987, approximately 300 new

complaints were filed. Crawford K. L., Due Obedience and the Rights ofVictims. Argentina's Transition to Democracy. In Human Rights Quarterly,12 (1990), pp. 17-52,25.

37. This revolt would become known as the Easter rebellion. Nino, Radical Evilon Trial, pp. 96-99.

38. Crawford, Due Obedience and the Rights of Victims, pp. 17-52.39. Malamud-Goti, Game Without End, pp. 65-70. Nino, Radical Evil on Trial,

pp. 102-103.40. Cited in Feitlowitz, A Lexicon of Terror, p. xi.41. Decreto 2741 [30 December 1990]. At: http://www.derechos.org/nizkor/arg/

doclindultos.html (accessed 12.02.2008).42. Ageitos S. M., Historia de la impunidad. De las actas de Videla a los indul

tos de Meltem. Buenos Aires, Adriana Hidalgo editora, 2002.43. Equipo Argentino de Antropologfa Forence (EAAF), Annual Report 2005,

pp. 154-155.44. Verbitsky H., The Flight. Confessions of an Argentine Dirty Warrior. New

York, The New Press, 1996.45. Osiel M., Mass Atrocity, Ordinary Evil, alld Hannah Arettdt. Criminal

Consciousness in Argentina's Dirty War. New Haven, Yale University Press,2001, p. 21.

46. Human Rights Watch, Reluctant Partner.47. Ibid.

186 Notes

48. EAAF, Annual Report 2005, pp. 153-154.49. Ibid., pp. 159-160.50. On this park of memory, see Macon c., Voiding the Void. Memory, Space

and Genocide in Contemporary Argentina (Unpublished paper). HuyssenA., Present Pasts. Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford,Stanford University Press, 2003, pp. 94-109.

An important exception to this increasing acknowledgment of the eventsthat happened during the last military dictatorship is the lack of a publicdebate on the painful experiences of the Malvinas/Falklands war and itsaftermath. Tozzi V., Malvinas como disputa. Tragedia, autorepresentaci6n ylimbo mlU!mico en eI encuentro con eI pasado reciente. In Macon C., Pensarla democracia, imaginar la transicion (1976-2006). Buenos Aires, Adour,2006, pp. 83-98. Tozzi V., Figuring the Malvinas War Experience. Heuristicand History as an UnfulfilJed Promise. In Ankersmit F. Domanska E., &KeIJner H., Re-Figuring Hayden White. Stanford, Stanford University Press,2009, pp. 261-281.

51. De Bonafini H., Las Madres en Primera Persona (Conference lecture) [6 July19881. At: http://www.madres.org/asociacion/historia/historia.asp (accessed15.01.2008).

52. Bouvard M. G., Revolutionizing Motherhood. The Mothers of the Plaza deMayo. Wilmington, Scholarly Resources Inc., 1994, p. 69.

53. Gorini U., La rebelion de las Madres. Historia de las Madres de Plaza deMayo. Tomo I (1976-1983). Buenos Aires, Grupo Editorial Norma, 2006,pp. 117-119.

54. De Bonafini, Las Madres en Primera Persona.55. Cited in Simpson & Bennett, The Disappeared, p. 159.56. Sanchez M., Historias de vida. Hebe de Bona(ini. Buenos Aires, Fraternal

del Nuevo Extremo, 1985, pp. 148-150. Bouvard, Revolutionizing Motherhood, p. 78.

57. Gorini, La rebelion de las Madres, p. 213.58. Simpson & Bennett, The Disappeared, p. 215.59. Sanchez, Historias de vida, p. 159.60. Fisher, Mothers of the Disappeared, pp. 72-74.61. Gorini, La rebelion de las Madres, p. 239.62. Bouvard, Revolutionizing Motherhood, p. 96.63. Sanchez, Historias de vida, p. 185.64. Bouvard, Revolutionizing Motherhood, pp. 96-97.65. Simpson & Bennett, The Disappeared, p. 168.66. Feitlowitz, A Lexicon of Terror, pp. 124-125.67. Macpherson S., The Mothers' last march ... but their influence continues. In

The New Internationalist, May 2006, p. 22.68. De Bonafini, Las Madres en Primera Persona.69. On the Argentine human rights movements, see Jelin E., The Politics of

Memory. The Human Rights Movements and the Construction of Democracy in Argentina. In Latin American Perspectives, 21 (1994), pp. 38-58.Brysk A., The Politics of Human Rights in Argentina. Protest, Change, andDemocratization. Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1994. Bonner M. D.,Defining Rights in Democratization. The Argentine Government and HumanRights Organizations, 1983-2003. In Latin American Politics and Society,47 (2005), 4, pp. 55-76.

70. Asociacion Madres de Plaza de Mayo, Entrevista a Hebe de Bonafini. At:www.madres.org/asp/contenido.asp?clave=786 (accessed 04.01.2008).

71. EspeciaIJy the ghostly status of the desaparecidos, the refusal to recognizetheir death, and the use of some radical slogans-most of aIJ the aforemen-

Notes 187

tioned aparicion con vida-were a point of discussion. Bouvard, Revolutionizing Motherhood, p. 148.

72. Asociacion Madres de Plaza de Mayo, Basta de milicos [December 1986].At: http://www.madres.org/marchas/marchasl_l0/marchas6 .asp (accessed06.01.2008).

73. See the website of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo-LInea Fundadora. At: http://www.madresfundadoras.org.arl(accessed 25.02.2008).

74. Joselovsky S., Madres de Plaza de Mayo. No hubo mas remedio. In El Periodista de Buenos Aires, 2 (25 April-l May 1986) 85, p. 7 (interview withMarfa A. Antokoletz).

75. The group of Madres led by Hebe de Bonafini can be recognized by its fuIJname, 'Asociacion Madres de Plaza de Mayo.' For reasons of convenience,however, I wiJJ further caJJ them 'Madres' or 'Madres de Plaza de Mayo.'

76. Simpson & Bennett, The Disappeared, p. 387.77. Asociacion Madres de Plaza de Mayo, Nuestras Consignas. At: http://

www.madres.org/asociacion/documentoslconsignas/consignas.asp (accessed06.01.2008).

78. Ibid. (My translation)79. Ibid. (My translation)80. Ibid. (My translation)81. Ibid. (My translation)

In what seems to be a direct reaction to these stances, the mothers of theLInea Fundadora explain their position in a document dating from 1987.They accept the need for exhumations if they are not carried out on a massivescale and if they happen after consultation of the close family of the victims.They do not reject post-humous honoring performed in universities, schools,syndicates, etc. if it is aimed at real remembrance. Further, they state that theindividual families have to decide whether they accept economic reparations.See Madres de Plaza de Mayo-LInea Fundadora, Brevisimo resumen de lacreacion y desarroJJo del movimiento de Madres de Plaza de Mayo [1987]. At:http://www.madresfundadoras.org.ar/documentos.shtml?x=69070 (accessed25.02.2008).

82. Asociacion Madres de Plaza de Mayo, Encendiendo fueguitos [20 February2003J. At: http://www.madres.org/asp/contenido.asp?clave=392 (accessed19.01.2008).

83. In later editions the prologue was adjusted, and the difference between violence by civilians and state violence was clearly stated.

84. In contrast, forensic anthropologists later complained that the CONADEPgave in to the pressure of the Madres and did not dare to state explicitly thatthe desaparecidos were dead. Salama M. C., Tumbas anonimas. Informesobre la identi(icacion de restos de vlctimas de la represion ilegal (Reportbe the Equipo Argentino de Antropologia Forense). Buenos Aires, Cata]ogosEditora, 1992, pp. 104-105.

85. Expressions from Asociacion Madres de Plaza de Mayo, Memoria Fertil. Ladictadura, la impunidad y la compleja trama de complicidades 1976-2005.Buenos Aires, Libros Editados, 2005. Asociacion Madres de Plaza de Mayo,Cierre del seminario [18 December 1999]. At: http://www.madres.org/asp/contenido.asp?dave=156 (accessed 28.01.2008).

86. De Bonafini, Las Madres en Primera Persona. (My translation)87. Testimony Graciela de Jeger. In Fisher, Mothers of the Disappeared, p. 129.88. Cited in Robben A., State Terror in the Netherworld. Disappearance and

Reburial in Argentina. In Robben A., Death, Mouming and Burial. ACross-Cultural Reader. MaIden, BlackwelJ Publishing, 2004, pp. 134148, 143.

188 Notes

89. Joyce & Stover, Witnesses from the Grave, p. 232.90. Ibid., pp. 257-259.91. Salama, Tumbas allonimas, p. 13. (My translation)92. Ibid., p. 16. (My translation)93. Asociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo, Nuestras tres mejores madres [14 July

2005]. At: http://www.madres.org/asp/contenido.asp?clave=1146 (accessed14.01.2008).

94. Asociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo, No reivindicamos los cuerpos denuestras compafieras, sino sus vidas, su pensamiento, su historia [14 July2005]. At: http://www.madres.org/asp/contenido.asp?clave=1140 (accessed14.01.2008). (My translation)

95. The following account is based on Feitlowitz, A Lexicon of Terror, pp. 173175.

96. Asociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo, jPido Castigo! [23 March 1995]. At:http://www.madres.org/asp/contenido.asp?clave=285 (accessed 10.01.2008).(My translation)

97. Feitlowitz, A Lexicon of Terror, pp. 215-217.98. Asociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo, Resefia de la historia de las madres

hasta 1995. At: http://www.madres.org/asp/contenido.asp?clave=2379.(accessed 23.10.2008).

99. Asociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo, Nuestros hijos nacen cada dfa [24March 1995]. At: http://www.madres.org/asp/contenido.asp?c1ave=287(accessed 10.01.2008). (My translation)

100. Feitlowitz, A Lexicon of Terror, pp. 242-243.101. Asociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo, Memoria Pertil.102. Asociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo, Carta a la Comisi6n Pro-Monumento

a los desaparecidos. At: http://www.madres.org/asp/contenido.asp?c1ave=744(accessed 25.01.2008).

103. Asociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo, Resefia de la historia de las madreshasta 1995.

104. Asociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo, Memoria Pertil. (My translation)105. Human Rights Watch, Argentina Confronts Past on Coup Anniversary [24

March 2004]. At: http://www.hrw.org/english/docs/2004/03/24/argent8213.htm (accessed 07.02.2008).

106. Asociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo, Memoria Pertil.107. Iramain D., Las Madres, Vencedoras en los Actos a 30 afios del golpe.

Reparaci6n polftica (y no econ6mica) desde el Estado. In Periodico MensualAsociacion Madres de Plaza de Mayo, April 2006. (My translation)

108. De Bonafini, Las Madres in primera persona.109. The ad is reproduced in Sanchez, Historias de vida. Hebe de Bonafini, pp.

238-239.110. Cited in Salama, Tumbas anonimas, pp. 43-44. (My translation)111. Ibid., p. 46. (My translation)112. Ibid., p. 51. (My translation)113. Mellibovsky M., Circle of Love over Death. Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo.

Willimantic, Curbstone Press, 1997, p. 122.114. See, for example, Camps R., Los Desaparecidos estan muertos. In El bimestre

politico y economic, 2 (1983), 7, pp. 62-65.115. Documento final sobre la guerra contra la subversi6n y el terrorismo [28

April 1983]. At: http://www.desaparecidos.org/nuncamas/web/investig/saydom/lasombrallasombr9.htm (accessed 11.03.2008) (My translation)

116. Ibid. (My translation)117. Ibid. (My translation)118. Ibid. (My translation)

Notes 189

119. Ibid. (My translation)120. Kindt T., Het discours van president Raul Alfonsfn (1983-1987). Democrati

sering na de 'Vuile Oorlog' in Argentinie. Gent, UGent, 2008. (Unpublishedmaster scription)

121. Decreto 2742 [30 December 1990]. At: http://www.derechos.org/nizkor/arg/doclindultos.html (accessed 12.02.2008). (My translation)

122. Robben, State Terror in the Netherworld, pp. 134-135.123. The speech pronounced by Carlos Menem during the ceremonial reburial is

published in: Menem c., La Esperanza y la Accion. Buenos Aires, EmeceEditores, 1990.

124. Neustadt B., Entrevista al General Martfn Balza [25 April 1995]. At: http://www.bernardoneustadt.org/contenido_88.htm (accessed 13.02.2011). (Mytranslation)

125. Expression from: Mellibovsky, Circle of Love over Death, p. x.126. Abudara Bini 0., El Derecho en psicoanalisis y los psicoanalistas ante derecho.

Culto del bienestar, cultura del malestar, religi6n del terror. At: http://www.madres.org/asp/contenido.asp?clave=1867 (accessed 27.01.2008).

127. Robben A., State Terror in the Netherworld, p. 144.128. Testimony Carmen de Guede in Fisher, Mothers of the Disappeared, p. 128.129. Asociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo, Discurso de Hebe de Bonafini [23

March 1995]. At: http://www.madres.org/asp/contenido.asp?clave=774(accessed 05.01.2008). (My translation)

130. Asociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo, Las mad res nos sentimos revolucionarias [March 1995]. At: http://www.madres.org/asp/contenido.asp?clave=420(accessed 05.01.2008). (My translation)

131. Asociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo, Creaci6n de la UPMPM. Breve ResefiaHist6rica de la Universidad Popular Madres de Plaza de Mayo At: http://www.madres.org/univupmpm/univumpm.asp (accessed 28.01.2008). Asociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo, ,Como naci6 la Universidad? [February2005]. At: http://www.madres.org/asp/contenido.asp?clave=512 (accessed28.01.2008).

132. Asociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo, Programa Citedra Historia Madres dePlaza de Mayo. At: http://www.madres.org/univupmpm/carreras/cursada_obligatoria/hist_madres/programa/programa.asp (accessed 28.01.2008).

133. Vazquez I., Aspectos de Memoria y Cultura en la Argentina postdictatorial. InVazquez I. & Downie K., Un pais. 30 aiios. El paiiuelo sigue haciendo historia. Buenos Aires, Ediciones Madres de Plaza de Mayo, 2006, pp. 201-217.

134. Ibid., p. 207. (My translation)135. Ibid., p. 213. (My translation)136. Vazquez I., Algunas relaciones entre etica y polftica en la post-dictadura

parte I [6 November 1999]. At: http://www.madres.org/asp/contenido.asp?c1ave=168 (accessed 28.01.2008).

137. Ibid. (My translation)138. Marf E., La construcci6n social de la memoria y del olvido-parte I [6

December 1999]. At: http://www.madres.org/asp/contenido.asp?clave=159(accessed 28.01.2008).

139. Asociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo, Cierre del seminario.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

1. Malan M., Submission to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. At:http://www.doj.gov.zaltrc/submit/malan.htm (accessed 13.04.2007).

2. From a poem by Zweli Mkhize, member of the Khulumani Support Group.

190 Notes

3. The TRC was most active and public between 1996 and 1998, but it existeduntil it released the last volumes of its report in 2003.

4. De Lange J., The Historical Context, Legal Origins and Philosophical Foundation of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In VillaVicencio C & Verwoerd W., Looking Back, Reaching Forward. Reflectionson the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa. Cape Town,University of Cape Town Press, 2000, pp. 14-31, 14.

5. For such arguments, see, for example, Norval A., Truth and Reconciliation.The Birth of the Present and the Reworking of History. In Joumal ofSouthern African Studies, 25 (1999), 3, pp. 49-519, 505. Du Toit A., Experimentswith Truth and Justice in South Africa. Stockenstr6m, Gandhi and the TRCIn Journal of Southem African Studies, 31 (2005),2, pp. 419-448, 441.

6. Goldstone R., Foreword. In Villa-vicencio & Verwoerd, Looking Back,Reaching Forward, pp. viii-xiii, x.

7. Doxtader E., Easy to Forget or Never (Again) Hard to Remember? In VillaVicencio C & Doxtader E., The Provocations of Amnesty. Memory, Justice and Impunity. Claremont, David Philip Publishers, 2003, pp. 121-J55,123.

8. Kundera is cited in, among other places, Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, Report (Volume 1), Cape Town, 1998, p. 116.

9. Boraine A., A Country Unmasked. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000,p.260.

10. Ibid., p. 288.11. Foreword by Desmond Tutu in TRC, Report (Volume 1), p. 2.12. Ibid.13. Asmal K., Asmal L., & Suresh Roberts R., Reconciliation Through Truth. A

Reckoning of Apartheid's Criminal Govemance. Cape Town, David Phi lipPublishers, 1996, p. 19.

14. Lollini A., Reconstructing the Past between Trials and History. The TRCExperience as a 'Remembrance Space.' In Quest: An African Journal of Philosophy, 16 (2002), 1-2, pp. 61-68.

15. See, for example, Jeffery A., The Truth About the Truth Commission. Johannesburg, South African Institute of Race Relations, 1999.

16. Wilson R. A., The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa.Legitimizing the Post-Apartheid State. Cambridge, Cambridge UniversityPress, 2001, pp. 25-27.

The very existence of the TRC was threatened when the Azanian PeoplesOrganisation (AZAPO) and the families of some prominent victims questioned the constitutionality of the amnesty provisions. See TRC, Report(Volume 1), pp. 174-200. Biko N., Amnesty and Denial. In Villa-Vicencio &Verwoerd, Looking Back, Reaching Forward, pp. 193-198.

J7. See, for example, van Zyl Slabbert F., Truth Without Reconciliation, Reconciliation without Truth. In Villa-Vicencio C & Doxtader E., The Provocations of Am/testy, pp. 315-326, 323. Forsberg T., The Philosophy andPractice of Dealing with the Past. Some Conceptual and Normative Issues.In Biggar N., Burying the Past. Making Peace and Doing Justice after CivilConflict. Washington, DC, Georgetown University Press, 2001, pp. 57-73.

Arguing from a therapeutic perspective, some have claimed that thecommission's stress on forgiveness and reconciliation and its repression ofother forms of psychological closure by less noble emotions such as angerand vengeance can have damaging consequences for survivors. See Hamber B. and Wilson R., Symbolic Closure Through Memory, Reparation andRevenge in Post-conflict Societies. In Journal of Human Rights, 1 (2002),1, pp. 35-53.

Notes 191

18. See, for example, Mamdani M., A Diminished Truth. In James W. & vande Vijver L., After the TRC Reflections on the Truth and ReconciliationCommission in South Africa. Claremont, David Philip Publishers, 2001, pp.58-61. Mamdani M., Amnesty or Impunity? A Preliminary Critique of theReport of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa (TRC).In Diacritics, 32 (2002), 3-4, pp. 33-59. Posel D., The TRC Report. WhatKind of History? What Kind of Truth? In Posel D. & Simpson G., Commissioning the Past. Understanding South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Johannesburg, Witwatersrand University Press, 2001, pp.147-172,148.

19. Bundy C, The Beast of the Past. History and the TRC In James & van deVijver, After the TRC, pp. 9-20, 20.

20. The transcript of Jacques Derrida's seminar is published as DerridaJ., ArchiveFever in South Africa. In Hamilton C et al., Refiguring the Archive. NewYork, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002, pp. 38-80, citation on p. 54.

21. Harris V., Truth and Reconciliation. An Exercise in Forgetting? [3 November2002]. At: http://www.saha.org.za/research/publications/FOIP_5_1_Harris.pdf (accessed 11.04.2007).

22. Rassool C, Witz L., & Minkley G., Burying and Memorialising the Body ofTruth. The TRC and National Heritage. In James & van de Vijver, After theTRC, pp. 115-127.

23. Holiday A., Forgiving and Forgetting. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In Nuttall S. & Coetzee C, Negotiating the Past. The Makingof Memory in South Africa. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000, pp.43-56. De Kok I., Cracked Heirlooms. Memory on Exhibition. In Nuttall &Coetzee, Negotiating the Past, pp. 57-74.

24. Harris V., Contesting Remembering and Forgetting. The Archive of SouthAfrica's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In Innovation, 24 (2002),pp. 1-8. .

25. Grunebaum-Ralph H., Re-Placing Pasts, Forgetting Presents. Narrative,Place, and Memory in the Time of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In Research in African Literatures, 32 (2001), 3, pp. 198-212,202.

26. Lodge T., South African Politics Since 1994. Cape Town, David Philip, 1999,pp. 27-38.

27. Marais H., South Africa. Limits to Change. The Political Economy of Transition. Cape Town, University of Cape Town Press, 2006, pp. 190-195.

28. Expression from Sparks A., Beyond the Miracle. Inside the New SouthAfrica. Johannesburg, Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2003, p. 43.

29. The following account of the history of Apartheid is based on information from the following books, except where indicated otherwise: Clark &Worger, South Africa. The Rise and Fall of Apartheid. Lapping B., Apartheid. A History. London, Grafton Books, 1986. Posel D., The Making ofApartheid 1948-1961. Conflict and Compromise. Oxford, Clarendon Press,1991. Worden N., The Making of Modem South Africa. Conquest, Apartheid, Democracy. Maiden, Blackwell Publishing, 2007.

30. Sparks, Tomorrow Is Another Country, pp. 21-36.31. Unless indicated otherwise, the following account of the negotiation process

is based on Gastrow P., Bargaining for Peace. South Africa and the NationalPeace Accord. Washington, DC, United States Institute of Peace Press, 1995.Spitz R. & Chaskalson M., The Politics of Transition. A Hidden Historyof South Africa's Negotiated Settlement. Oxford, Hart Publishing, 2000.Sparks, Tomorrow Is Another Country. Welsh D., Negotiating a DemocraticConstitution. In Spence J. E., Change in South Africa. London, Pinter Publishers, 1994, pp. 22-49,24.

192 Notes

32. Document published in Slovo J., Negotiations. What Room for Compromise?In African Communist, 3 (1992), pp. 36-40.

33. Slovo, Negotiations, p. 40.34. Doxtader, Easy to Forget or Never (Again) Hard to Remember?, p. 138.35. This lecture was published as Asmal K., Victims, Survivors and Citizens

Human Rights, Reparations and Reconciliation. In South African Joumal ofHuman Rights, 8 (1992) 4, pp. 491-511.

36. Boraine, A Country Unmasked, p. 14.37. The discussions and papers presented at these two congresses are published

as Boraine, Levy & Scheffer, Dealing with the Past. Boraine A. & Levy J.,The Healing of a Nation? Cape Town, Justice in Transition, 1995.

38. Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act. [26 July 1995].At: http;llwww.info.gov.za/view/DownloadFileAction?id=70957 (accessed20.04.2007).

39. Simpson G., "Tell No Lies, Claim No Easy Victories." A Brief Evaluation ofSouth Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In Pose! D. & SimpsonG., Commissioning the Past, pp. 220-251.

40. Albie Sachs in Boraine, Levy, & Scheffer, Dealing with the Past, p. 146.41. Samarhakhsh-Liberge L., Truth and History in the Post-Apartheid South

African Context. In Quest: An African Joumal of Philosophy, 16 (2002),1-2, pp. 151-164, 156.

42. Maier C. S., A Surfeit of Memory? Reflections on History, Melancholy, andDenial. In History and Memory,S (1993), pp. 1936-1951.

43. Doxtader E., Making Rhetorical History in a Time of Transition. The Occasion, Constitution, and Representation of South African Reconciliation. InRhetoric & Public Affairs, 4 (2001),2, pp. 223-260, 235.

44. Andre Du Toit, however, remarks that the notions of truth and reconciliationkept evolving so that the religiously inspired stress on reconciliation becameless prominent toward the later more procedural phases of the TRC process.Du Toit A., The Moral Foundations of the South African TRC. Truth asAcknowledgement and Justice as Recognition. In Rotberg R. I. & ThompsonD., Truth v. Justice. The Morality of Truth Commissions. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2000, pp. 122-140, 130.

45. Nelson Mandela cited in Doxtader, Easy to Forget or Never (Again) Hard toRemember?, p. 133.

Citing Mandela's words, 'We must forget the past,' the American historian Eric Foner, after attending a workshop in 1994, warned his SouthAfrican colleagues that the new government's policy of national reconciliation could prove a major challenge to their profession. Foner E., "We MustForget the Past." History in the New South Africa. In The Yale Review, 83(1995),2, pp. 1-17.

46. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, Report (Volume. 5),Cape Town, 1998, p. 206.

47. Soyinka W., The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness, Oxford,Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 33.

48. TRC Report (Volume 1), pp. 110-114.49. Du Toit A., The Truth & Reconciliation Commission as contemporary his

tory. In Jeppie 5., Toward New Histories for South Africa. On the Place ofthe Past ill Our Present. Landsowne,Juta Gariep, 2005, pp. 61-80, 61.

Antoon De Baets has observed that historians are generally underrepresented in truth commissions. De Baets A., Responsible History. New York,Berghahn Books, 2009.

50. Cherry, Daniel, & Fullard, Researching the 'Truth,' pp. 19-20.

Notes 193

Similarly, Piers Pigou, another member of the TRC's research team, laterbecame very disappointed about missed opportunities. See Pigou P., FalsePromises and Wasted Opportunities? Inside South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In Posel & Simpson, Commissionillg the Past, pp.37-65.

The absence of a thoroughly historical approach is not unique to theSouth African TRC. Similarities can be found in many truth commissions.See, for example, Grandin G., The Instruction of Great Catastrophe. TruthCommissions, National History, and State Formation in Argentina, Chile,and Guatemala. In American Historical Review, 110 (2005),1,46-67,48.

51. The lack of a historical methodology also seems to have been a point of conflict between the commissioners themselves. In Volume 5 of the final report,for example, a minority position by the Afrikaner commissioner WynandMalan is included. Although it is in the first place politically inspired, it alsocriticizes the lack of a profound qualitative historical analysis. See MinorityPosition submitted by Commissioner Wynand Malan. In TRC, Final Report(Volume 5) pp. 436-456.

52. The expression 'sting of memory' is used in Tutu D. M., No Future withoutForgivelless, New York, Doubleday, 1999, p. 271.

53. TRC, Report (Volume 1), p. 7.54. Desmond Tutu cited in Rassool, Witz, & Minkley, Burying and Memorialis

ing the Body of Truth, p. 115.55. Thabo Mbeki for the African National Congress, Statemellt to the Truth

alld Recollciliation Commission [August 1996]. At: http://www.anc.org.za/2639 (accessed 13.04.2007).

56. Asmal, Asmal, and Suresh Roberts, Reco/lciliation through Truth, p. 208.57. TRC, Report (Volume 1), p. 22 (Foreword by Desmond Tutu).58. Soyinka, The Burden of Memory, p. 20.59. Asmal, Asmal, & Suresh Roberts, Recollciliatioll through Truth, pp. 64 and

161.60. Constitution of the Republic of South Africa [1993]. At: http://www.info.

gov.za/documents!constitution/93cons.htm (accessed 20.04.2007).61. Ankersmit F. R., Historicism. An Attempt at Synthesis. In History alld The

ory, 34 (1995), 3, pp. 143-161, 159.62. Wilson R. A., Justice and Legitimacy in the South African Transition. In

Barahona de Brito A., Gonzalez-Enrfquez c., & Aguilar P., The Politics ofMemory. Trallsitional Justice in Democratizing Societies. Oxford, OxfordUniversity Press, 2001, pp. 195-196.

63. Later, this 'firm cut-off date' was postponed to a <late in 1994 in order toinclude the political violence that occurred around the period of the electionsinto the amnesty process.

64. Wilson, The Politics of Truth and Recollciliatioll ill South Africa, p. 16.65. Constitution of the Republic of South Africa [1996]. At: http://www.polity.

org.za/htmllgovdocs/bills/sacon96.html (accessed 20.04.2007).66. Buur L., Monumental Historical Memory. Managing Truth in the Everyday

Work of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In Posel& Simpson, Commissioniltg the Past, pp. 66-93, 78.

67. TRC, Report (Volume 1), pp. 448-497.68. TRC, Report (Volume 3).69. TRC, Report (Volume 2).70. Cherry, Daniel, & Fullard, Researching the 'Truth,' p. 20.71. Wilson, The Politics of Truth alld Recollciliatioll ill South Africa, pp.

62-94.

194 Notes

72. TRC, Report (Volume 1), p. 4.73. Bundy, The Beast of the Past, p. 17.74. Teeger C. & Vinitzky-Seroussi V., Controlling for Consensus. Commemo

rating Apartheid in South Africa. In Symbolic Interaction, 30 (2007), 1, pp.57-78.

75. According to Grunebaum-Ralph, this mode of commemoration is best illustrated by the Robben Island case: 'As an unlived space in the present, theisland and its historical representations can be domesticated; its spaces andits narratives are packaged all the more as a foreclosed past. GrunebaumRalph, Re-Placing Pasts, Forgetting Presents, pp. 200-201.

76. de Klerk F.W., Submission to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission byMr. F. W., de Klerk, leader of the National Party. At: http://www.doj.gov.za/trc/submit/np_truth.htm (accessed 13.04.2007).

77. Asmal A. et al., Reconciliation through Truth, p. 52.78. Ibid., p. 209.

It should be noted that Asmal is talking about the historical consciousness of a large part of the South African population and not specificallyabout the views of the direct victims or the direct perpetrators of Apartheid'satrocities. The cited fragment is relevant, however, because the TRC and itsdiscourse were never solely directed at the direct victims or perpetrators ofhuman-rights abuses but also at the population at large.

79. Colvin C. J., Overview of the Reparations Program in South Africa. In DeGreiff P., The Handbook of Reparations. Oxford, Oxford University Press,2006, pp. 176-215.

80. Fullard M. & Rousseau N., An Imperfect Past. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Transition. In Daniel]., Habib A. & Southall R., Stateof the Nation. South Africa 2003-2004. Cape Town, HSRC Press, 2003,pp. 78-104, 87. Also see Madlingozi T., Good Victim, Bad Victim. Apartheid's Beneficiaries, Victims, and the Struggle for Social Justice. In le RouxW. & van Marle K., Law, Memory and the Legacy of Apartheid. Ten Yearsafter AZAPO v President of South Africa. Pretoria, Pretoria University LawPress, 2007, pp. 107-126.

81. The arrangement also frustrated the ex-TRC commissioners who foresaw amuch higher sum that would be paid each six months over a period of severalyears. Lecture Alex Boraine, South Africa. 10 Years After the TRC, organized by the International Centre for Transitional Justice (lCTJ), Brussels,29 August 2006.

82. Fullard & Rousseau, An Imperfect Past, p. 90.83. The tension within the ANC leadership between this formal rejection of a

general amnesty and the longing to let 'bygones by bygones' was very clearin Mbeki's discussion of the TRC report before Parliament in 1999: 'it seemsimportant that we should all agree that whatever happens we should neverentertain the idea of a general amnesty. At the same time, serious consideration will have to be given to ensuring that we do not allow ourselves to bedrawn into a situation of conflict as a result of the political crimes of the past[... ] all of us should say yesterday was a foreign country, as young Afrikaners were happy to proclaim.' Statement of the President of the AfricanNational Congress, Thabo Mbeki, on the Report of the TRC at the Joint Sitting of the Houses of Parliament, Cape Town, 25 February 1999.

84. Khulumani's membership base currently (2011) comprises around 55,000individuals, most of them poor black people. Only 10 percent of its memberswho are gross human rights violations survivors, Khulumani claims, wereincluded in the TRC process. Khulumani Support Group, Membership. At:http://www.khulumani.net/(accessed 14.02.2011).

Notes 195

85. Hamber B., Mosikare N, Friedman M., & Maepa T., Speaking Out. TheRole of the Khulumani Victim Support Group in Dealing with the Past inSouth Africa. Unpublished paper presented at psychosocial programs afterwar and dictatorship Conference, Frankfurt, June 2000.

86. Makhalemele 0., Southern Africa Reconciliation Project: Khulumani CaseStudy (Research report written as part of the Southern Africa ReconciliationProject, 2004).

87. Colvin C. J., "We Are Still Struggling." Storytelling, Reparations and Reconciliation after the TRC [December 2000]. At: http://www.csvr.org.za/docs/trc!wearestillstruggling.pdf (accessed 19.01.2008). (Research report writtenfor the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation in collaborationwith Khulumani Victims Support Group and the Cape Town Trauma Centrefor Survivors of Violence and Torture.)

Also see Colvin C. ]., Ambivalent Narrations. Pursuing the Political through Traumatic Storytelling. In Political and Legal AnthropologyReuiew, 27 (2004), 1, pp. 72-89.

88. Colvin, We Are Still Struggling.89. See the website of the Khulumani Support Group. At: http://www.khulu

mani.netl (accessed 15.01.2008).90. Colvin, We Are Still Struggling.91. Colvin C. J., "Brothers and Sisters, Do Not Be Afraid of Me." Trauma, His

tory and the Therapeutic Imagination in the New South Africa. In Hodgkin K. & Radstone S., Memory, History, Nation. Contested Pasts. London,Transaction Publishers, 2005, pp. 165-166, p. 164.

92. Khulumani Support Group, Advocacy and Lobbying Post-TRC [15 November 2007]. At: http://www.khulumani.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=18&Itemid=10 (accessed 15.01.2008).

93. Khulumani Support Group, Charter for Redress Proposed by Victims andSurvivors of Apartheid Gross Human Rights Abuses and Violations in SouthAfrica. At: http://www.khulumani.net/campaigns/10-Redress/212-charterfor-redress.html (accessed 15.01.2008).

94. Khulumani Support Group, Khulumani International Lawsuit Appeal Victory Removes an Obstacle to Justice for Victims and to the Advance of Corporate Accountability [13 October 2007]. At: http://www.khulumani.net/press-releasesl5 -Pressl13 -Khulumani%20Wins%20Lawsuit%20Appeal.html (accessed 15.01.2008).

95. Khulumani Support Group, Khulumani East Rand protest focusses on TRC'Unfinished Business' [21 November 2005]. At: http://www.khulumani.net/press-releasesl5 -Pressl178 -khul umani -ea st-rand-protest-focusse soon-trcqunfinished-businessq.html (accessed 15.01.2008).

96. Khulumani Support Group, Remembering the Liberation of Auschwitz [31January 2005]. At: http://www.khulumani.net/press-releases/5-Press/96remembering-the-liberation-of-auschwitz.html (accessed 19.01.2008).

97. Khulumani Support Group, Betrayal of Khulumani's 'Born Frees' [12 June2005]. At: http://www.khulumani.net/press-releases/5-PressI155 -betrayalof-khulumanis-born-frees.html (accessed 15.01.2008).

98. Khulumani Support Group, Judge Mohamed Jajbhay's Comments [6 July2005]. At: http://www.khulumani.net/press-releases/5-Pressl175 -judge-mohamed-jajbhays-comments.html (accessed 15.01.2008).

99. Khulumani Support Group, 4'h World Chambers Congress [21 June 2005].At: http://www.khulumani.net/press-releases/5-Pressl140-4th-world-chambers-congress.html (accessed 19.01.2008).

100. Khulumani Support Group, Khulumani Case in New York's Second Circuit Court of Appeals from January 24, 2006 [15 November 2007]. At:

196 Notes

http://www.khulumani.net/press-releases/5-Press/16 -khulumani -case-innew-yorks-second-ci rcuit-court-of-appeals-from -j anua ry-24 -2006 .htm I(accessed 15.01.2008).

101. Ibid.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

1. Peace Agreement between the Government of the Republic of Sierra Leoneand the Revolutionary United Front of Sierra Leone [30 November 1996].At: http://www.usip.org/files/file/resources/collections/peace_agreements/sierra_Ieone_1l301996.pdf (accessed 14.11.2007).

2. Peace Agreement Between the Government of Sierra Leone and the Revolutionary United Front of Sierra Leone [7 July 1999]. At: http://www.usip.org/files/file/resources/collections/peace_agreements/sierra_leone_07071999.pdf(accessed 14.11.2007).

3. Kelsall T., Truth, Lies, Ritual. Preliminary Reflections on the Truth andReconciliation Commission in Sierra Leone. In Human Rights Quarterly,27(2005), pp. 361-391.

4. Unless indicated otherwise, this overview is based on the following sources:Richards P., Fighting for the Rain Forest. War, Youth & Recources in SierraLeone. Oxford, James Currey & Heinemann, 1996. Gberie L., A Dirty Warin West Africa. The RUF and the Destruction of Sierra Leone. London, C.Hurst & Co. Ltd., 2005. Keen D., Conflict and Collusion in Sierra Leone.Oxford, James Currey Ltd., 2005. Pham P. J., Child Soldiers, Adult Interests. The Global Dimensions of the Sierra Leonean Tragedy. New York,Nova Science Publishers, 2005. SLTRC, Witness to Truth. Sierra LeoneTruth & Reconciliation Commission (Volume 3A). Accra (Ghana), GraphicPackaging Ltd., 2004.

5. Kieh G. K., Jr., State-building in Post-Civil War Sierra Leone. In African andAsian Studies, 4 (2005), 1-2, pp. 163-185.

In this chapter, I do not focus on the preconditions of the conflict; forsuch a focus, see Alie J. A. D., Background to the Conflict (1961-1991).What Went Wrong and Why? In Ayissi A. & Poulton E., Bound to Cooperate. Conflict, Peace and People in Sierra Leone. Geneva, UNIDIR, 2006,pp. 15-36. Also see Alie J. A. D., A New History of Sierra Leone. London,Macmillan Publishers, 1990.

6. SLTRC, Witness to Truth (Volume 3A), p. 88.7. Squire c., Bound to Cooperate. Peacemaking and Power-Sharing in Sierra

Leone. In Ayissi & Poulton, Bound to Cooperate, pp. 49-66, 53.8. SLTRC, Witness to Truth (Volume 3A).9. Adebajo A., Building Peace in West Africa. Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guin

ea-Bissau. Colorado, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002, p. 89.10. Hayner P., Negotiating Peace in Sierra Leone. Confronting the Justice Chal

lenge. Report for the International Center for Transitional Justice, December2007, p. 6.

11. Berewa S., Addressing Impunity Using Divergent Approaches. The Truth andReconciliation Commission and the Special Court. In UNAMSIL, Truth andReconciliation in Sierra Leone. Freetown, 2001, pp. 55-56.

12. Hayner, Negotiating Peace in Sierra Leone, p. 12.13. O'Flaherty M., Sierra Leone's Peace Process. The Role of the Human Rights

Community. In Human Rights Quarterly, 26 (2004), pp. 29-62,50.14. Ibid., p. 54.

Notes 197

15. President Kabbah later rather cynically remarked that, 'Obviously since theCommission would not have powers to punish, the AFRC/RUF willinglyagreed to its inclusion in the Agreement.' From A Statement by his Excellencythe President Alhaji Dr. Ahmad Tejan Kabbah Made Before the Truth andReconciliation Commission on Tuesday 5th August, 2003. At: http://www.sierra-Ieone.org/Speeches/kabbah-080503.html (accessed 14.11.2007).

16. Peace Agreement Between the Government of Sierra Leone and the Revolutionary United Front of Sierra Leone [7 July 1999].

17. Cited in Hayner, Negotiating Peace in Sierra Leone, p. 5.18. Berman E. G. & Labonte M. T., Sierra Leone. In Durch W. J., Twenty

First-Century Peace Operations. Washington, DC, United States Institute ofPeace, 2006, pp. 141-228.

19. Cook N., Sierra Leone. Transition to Peace. In Sillinger B., Sierra Leone.Current Issues (lIld Background. New York, Nova Science Publishers, 2003,pp. 17-54,24. Pham, Child Soldiers, Adult Interests, p. 149.

20. SLTRC, Witltess to Truth (Volume 3B), p. 56.21. Ibid., p. 53.22. Hayner P., The Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Review

ing the First Year (Report written for International Center for TransitionalJustice). January 2004, p. 3.

23. Kieh, State-building in Post-Civil War Sierra Leone, p. 175.24. Hayner, Negotiating Peace in Sierra Leone, p. 27.25. SLTRC, Witness to Truth (Volume 3B), p. 363.26. See for example the report of the New York-based NGO 'International Cen

ter for Transitional Justice': Wierda M., Hayner P., & van Zyl P., Exploringthe Relationship Between the Special Court and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Sierra Leone. New York, ICTJ, June 2002.

27. Schabas W. A., The Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission. InRoht-Arriaza & Mariezcurrena, Transitional Justice in the Twellty-FirstCentury, pp. 21-42,23.

28. Schabas W. A., A Synergistic Relationship. The Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Special Court of Sierra Leone. In CriminalLaw Forum, 15 (2004), pp. 3-54, 8.

29. Schabas, A Synergistic Relationship, p. 8.30. In a briefing in late 2002, for example, the truth commission observed that

some people still misunderstood the purpose of the commission and its relationship with the Special Court. Therefore, it once more informed the publicthat it was an independent body, that it did not seek to punish anyone, andthat it was 'not a trap.' See Eighth Weekly Briefing of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Chaired by Professor William Schabas [11 September 2002]. At: http://www.sierra-leone.org/history-conflict.html (accessed04.03.2007).

See, for example, the booklet created by the Special Court to inform theSierra Leonean public about its mission. Special Court for Sierra Leone,Wetin Na Di Speshal Kat? The Special Court Made Simple. Freetown, NABsTech,2003.

31. Schabas, The Relationship Between Truth Commissions and InternationalCourts. The Case of Sierra Leone. In Human Rights Quarterly, 25 (2003),pp. 1035-1066, 1052.

32. Cited in SLTRC, Witness to Truth (Volume 3B), p. 423.33. Ibid., p. 424.34. Ibid., p. 425.35. Ibid., p. 418.

98 Notes

36. Ibid., p. 425.37. Address by the President his Excellency Alhaji Dc. Ahmad Tejan Kabbah at

the Start of Public Hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation commission [14April 2003]. At: http://www.sierra-leone.org/Speeches/kabbah-041403.html(accessed 16.01.2007).

38. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission Act 2000 [10 February, 2000].At: http://www.usip.org/lihraryltc/doc/charters/tc_sierraJeone_02102000.html (accessed 13.01.2007).

39. Ibid.40. Statute of the Special Court for Sierra Leone [16 January 2002]. At: http://

www.sc-sl.org/ (accessed 11.04.2008).41. SLTRC, Witness to Truth (Volume 3B), p. 369. Schabas, A Synergistic Rela-

tionship, p. 21.42. SLTRC, Witness to Truth (Volume 1), p. 43.43. Ibid.44. Ibid.45. See also Schabas W. A., The Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commis

sion, p. 28.46. Schabas, A Synergistic Relationship, p. 15.47. Torpey J., Introduction. In Torpey J., Politics and the Past. all Repairing

Historical Injustices. Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003,p. 1.

48. SLTRC, Witness to Truth (Volume 3B), p. 503.49. Ibid., p. 505.50. Ibid.51. The idea that every citizen equally was a victim of the conflict and that every

citizen similarly shares some responsibility is a leitmotiv in the work of thecommission. This construction of a 'national victim' or of the nation as victim can be explained by pointing to the manner in which this perspectivecomes in handy when commissioners and policy makers start forgiving perpetrators in the name of the nation (instead of leaving forgiveness as a privateprerogative of victims).

52. De Man P., Literary History and Literary Modernity. In Blindness andInsight. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1983.

53. Address by Rt. Rev. Joseph Humper Chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission at the Official Commencement of Statement Taking by theCommission. At: http://www.sierra-leone.org/(accessed14.11.2008).

54. The following material is taken from the transcripts of the public hearingsthat are included as an appendix to the SLTRC report titled 'Transcriptsof TRC Public hearings.' At: http://www.sierra-leone.org/TRCDocuments.html (accessed 14.11.2008).

55. Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission, LTRC , Appendix 4:Memorials, Mass Graves and Other Sites. At: http://www.sierra-leone.org/TRCDocuments.html (accessed 14.11.2008).

56. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission Act 2000.57. The commissioners, for example, reject the practice of swearing that func

tions as a central mechanism in the practices of 'traditional justice' in SierraLeone. When the perpetrator of a crime does not reveal himself or when heis hiding, it is not uncommon in certain parts of Sierra Leone to pronouncea ritual curse so as to punish the perpetrator with the help of spirits. For adiscussion of this and other mechanisms of 'traditional justice,' see Alie J. A.D., Reconciliation and Traditional Justice. Tradition-based Practices of theKpaa Mende in Sierra Leone. In Huyse L. & Salter M., Traditional Justice

and Recollciliation after Violent Conflict. Learning from African Experiences. Stockholm, International IDEA, 2008, pp. 123-147.

58. SLTRC, Witness to Truth (Volume 3B), p. 440.59. According to a survey conducted by two NGOs in 2002, thus prior to the

actual operations of the SLTRC, the majority of ex-combatants had a predominantly positive view of the truth commission. See PRIDE & ICTJ, ExCombatant Views of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and SpecialCourt in Sierra Leone. Freetown, 2002.

Rosalind Shaw, however, argues that the results of this survey were misguided, a fact that was clearly shown when most ex-combatants stayed awayfrom the public hearings. Shaw R., Memory Frictions. Localizing the Truthand Reconciliation Commission in Sierra Leone. In The International JourItal of Transitional Justice, 1 (2007), pp. 183-207, 197.

60. Ibid., pp. 183-207.61. Shaw R., Rethinking Truth and Reconciliation Commissions. Lessons from

Sierra Leone. Washington, DC, United States Institute of Peace, 2005. (Special Report)

62. Shaw R., Displacing Violence. Making Pentecostal Memory in PostwarSierra Leone. In Cultural Allthropology, 22 (2007), 1, pp. 66-93, 67.

63. Shaw, Rethinking Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, p. 9.64. Ibid.65. Shaw R., Transitional Subjectivities. Reconciling Ex-combatants in North-

ern Sierra Leone. (Unpublished paper, 2005)66. Ibid.67. Shaw, Memory Frictions, p. 195.68. Agamben G., Time and History. Critique of the Instant and the Continuum.

In Infancy and History. The Destruction of Experience. London, Verso,1993, pp. 89-106, 91.

NOTES TO THE PRELIMINARY CONCLUSION

1. Philippe Petit on Henry Rouso In Rousso H., The Haunting Past. History,Memory, and Justice in Contemporary France. Philadelphia, University ofPennsylvania Press, 2002, p. xxi.

2. Nora P., Between Memory and History. Les Lieux de Memoire. In Representations, 26 (1989), pp. 7-24, 9.

3. Torpey, Making Whole What Has Been Smashed, p. 32.4. Ackerman B., The Future of the Liberal Revolution. New Haven, Yale Uni

versity Press, 1992, p. 5.5. King P., Thiltking Past a Problem. Essays on the History of Ideas. London,

Frank Cass, 2000.6. Ibid., p. 55. (Italics in the original)7. Derrida J., Specters of Marx. The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning,

and the New International. New York, Routledge, 1994, p. 48.8. De Certeau, The Writing of History. New York, Columbia University Press,

1988, p. 101.9. I have to thank Wulf Kansteiner for this frank reformulation of my thesis.

10. Fritsch M., The Promise of Memory. History and Politics in Marx, Benjamin and Derrida. New York, State University of New York, 2005, p. 3.

11. Expression from Lambek M., The Past Imperfect. Remembering As MoralPractice. In Antze P. & Lambek M., Tense Past. Cultural Essays in Traumaand Memory. New York, Routledge, 1996, pp. 235-254.

Notes

12. The expression language of fidelity is used in Booth J. W., The Unforgotten.Memories of Justice. In American Political Science Review, 95 (2001),4, pp.777-791.

13. The expression 'hierarchies of time' is taken from Rousso, The HauntingPast, p. 16.

14. However, the Madres' discourse also sometimes manifests references to temporal reversibility.

15. Shaw R., Memories of the Slave Trade. Ritual and the Historical Imagination in Sierra Leone. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2002.

16. Shaw, Memories of the Slave Trade, p. 9.17. See also Shaw R., The Production of Witchcraft/Witchcraft as Production.

Memory, Modernity, and the Slave Trade in Sierra Leone. In American Eth1tologist, 24 (1997),4, pp. 856-876.

A similar account of how rituals can serve as an art of memory is providedfor the case of Madagascar by Cole J., Forget Colonialism? Sacrifice andthe Art of Memory i1t Madagascar. Berkeley, University of California Press,2001, p. 283.

18. Finucane R. c., Appeara1lces of the Dead. A Cultural History of Ghosts.London, Junction Books, 1982.

Peter Buse and Andrew Stott sharply express the antagonistic relationship between the figure of the ghost and the notion of linear time: 'Indeed,anachronism might well be the defining feature of ghosts, now and in thepast, because haunting, by its very structure, implies a deformation of lineartemporality: there may be no proper time for ghosts.' Buse P. & Stott A., AFuture for Haunting. In Buse P. & Stott A., Ghosts Deco1tstructio1t, Psychoanalysis, History. London, Macmillan, 1999, p. 1.

19. On the increasing appeal of enchantment in Africa, see Comaroff ]. &Comaroff J. L., Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction. Notesfrom the South African Postcolony. In American Eth1tologist, 26 (1999),2,pp. 279-303; Geschiere P., The Modernity of Witchcraft. Politics and theOccult in Postcolo1tial Africa. London, University of Virginia Press, 1995.

20. Igreja V. & Dias-Lambranca B., Restorative Justice and the Role of Magamba Spirits in Post-Civil War Gorongosa. In Huyse L. & Salter M., Traditio1tal Justice and Reconciliatio1t after Violent C01lflict. Leami1tg fromAfrican Experie1tces. Stockholm, International IDEA, 2008, pp. 61-83.

21. Honwana A., Undying Past. Spirit Possession and the Memory of War inSouthern Mozambique. In Meyer B. & Pels P., Magic and Modemity. 11tterfaces of Revelation a1td Co1tcealme1tt. Stanford, Stanford University Press,2003, pp. 60-80.

22. Mueggler E., Spectral Subversions. Rival Tactics of Time and Agency inSouthwest China. In Comparative Studies in Society and History, 41 (1999),3,pp.458-481,462.

23. Ibid., p. 467.

J\.Tr,TY'C TO CHAPTER 5

1. Jameson F., The End of Temporality. In Critical Inquiry, 29 (2003), pp. 695718,699.

2. Simmel G., Essays on Interpretation in Social Science (ed. Guy Oakes).Totowa, Rowman and Littlefield, 1980, p. 127.

3. Benjamin W., Theses on the Philosophy of History. In Arendt H., Illuminations. New York, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968, pp. 253-264.

Notes L.VI

4. Agamben G., Time and History. Critique of the Instant and the Continuum.In Infancy and History. The Destruction of Experience. London, Verso,1993,pp.89-106,p.96.

5. The contrast between cultures attached to a circular view of time and thoseconceiving of time as linear should not be drawn too strictly. Chester G.Starr has argued that much of the claims about the alleged absence of linearconcepts of time in antiquity are based on a confusion between historicaland philosophical notions of time. Whereas antique philosophy indeed oftenascribed a cyclical nature to time, antique 'historians' , according to Starr,did work with linear notions of time. Starr Ch. G., Historical and Philosophical Time. In History and Theory, 6 (1966), pp. 24-35.

For some other criticisms of this strict juxtaposition, see MomiglianoA. D., Studies in Historiography. London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966.Trompf G. W., The Idea of Historical Recurre1tce i1t Westem Thought.Berkeley, University of California Press, 1979.

6. Turetzky P., Time. London, Routledge, 1998, p. 56.Hannah Arendt, however, warns that the similarity between the Chris

tian and the modern concepts of time is deceptive. Most often this comparison is supported by a reference to Augustine's refution of pagan cyclictime by his claim about the uniqueness of the incarnation of Christ. Yet,as Arendt remarks, Augustine never ascribed a similar uniqueness to secular events. Augustine's concept of secular history, according to Arendt, wasessentially the same as that of the Romans, i.e. it equally stressed the repetition of events.

Arendt H., The Concept of History. Ancient and Modern. In BetweenPast and Future. Six Exercises in Political Thought. New York, The VikingPress, 1961, pp. 65-66.

7. Wilcox D. j., The Measure ofTimes Past. Pre-Newtonian Chronologies and theRhetoric of Relative Time. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1987, p. 8.

8. Newton's formulation of absolute time was neither the first nor the last occasion on which philosophers clashed over the nature of time. Absolute timehad supporters before Newton, and during Newton's life relative time wasdefended, for example, by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. See Capek M., TheConflict between the Absolutist and the Relational Theory of Time beforeNewton. In Joumal of History of Ideas, 48 (1987),4, pp. 595--608. Earman]., World Enough and Space-time. Absolute Versus Relational Theories ofSpace and Time. Cambridge (Mass.), MIT Press, 1989.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, relative time was promotedby ]ohann Gottfried Herder, who, as W. Von Leyden points out, 'held theview that everything carries within itself its own measure of time, or ratherthe measure of its own time.' Von Leyden W., History and the Concept ofRelative Time. In History and Theory, 2 (1963),3, pp. 263-285,279.

9. Cited in Turetzky, Time, p. 73.10. As Barbara Adam explains, 'By eliminating all boundary conditions Newton

was able to conceive of motion as reversible, as symmetrical with respect tothe past and the future. His time t symbolized a unit length without direction.' Adam B., Time. Oxford, Polity Press, 2004, p. 30.

11. Wi!cox, The Measure of Times Past, p. 8.The objectivistic and universalistic features of Newtonian time accord

ing to some commentators also directly support geo-political imperialism.Appleby, Hunt, and]acob, for example, claim that, 'The ninenteenth-centurymodernization of history rested on a new conception of time drawn fromNewtonian science. [... ] The new characteristics of time did not appea

202 Notes

all at once, and many historians continued to espouse one or more elementsof previous time schemas. But by the last decades of the nineteenth century,most educated Westerners possessed a universal and universalizing sense oftime that was, moreover, ideally suited to the new age of European imperialism.' Appleby J., Hunt L., & Jacob M., Telling the Truth about History. NewYork, W.W. Norton & Company, 1994, pp. 53-55.

12. Turetzky, Time, p. 74.13. Kern S., The Culture of Time and Space. 1880-1918. Cambridge (Mass.),

Harvard University Press, 1983, p. 20.14. Wilcox, The Measure of Times Past, p. 8.15. Bentley M., Modern Historiography. An Introduction. London, Routledge,

1999, p. 2.16. Wilcox, The Measure of Times Past, p. 9.17. Ibid., p. 13.18. Ibid., p. 8319. Turetzky, Time, p. 20.20. Whitrow G. J., Time in History. Views of Time from Prehistory to the Pres-

ent Day. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1988, p. 102.21. Turetzky, Time, p. 68.22. Ibid., p. 69.23. Ibid. Whitrow, Time in History, p. 110.24. Lyotard J.-F., The Inhuman. Reflections on Time. Stanford, Stanford Uni

versity Press, 1992, p. 59.25. For a detailed history of the meaning of the word historicism, see Lee D. E.

& Beck R. N., The Meaning of "Historicism." In The American HistoricalReview, 59 (1954), 3, pp. 568-577. Iggers G. G., Historicism. The Historyand Meaning of the Term. In Journal of the History of Ideas, 56 (1995), 1,pp. 129-152. Hamilton P., Historicism. London, Routledge, 1996.

26. Popper K. R., The Poverty of Historicism. New York, Routledge, 1999.27. Iggers, Historicism, p. 137.28. Hamilton, Historicism, p. 2.29. Iggers G. G., The German Conception ofHistory. The National Tradition of

Historical Thought From Herder to the Present. Middletown, Wesleyan University Press, 1968. Iggers G. G., The 'Crisis' of Historicism and ChangingConceptions of Historical Time. In Comprendre, 43-44 (1977), pp. 60-73.

30. Mannheim K., Historicism. In Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge (ed.Paul Kecskemeti). New York, Oxford University Press, 1952, pp. 84-133.

31. According to Frank Ankersmit, it is '[ ... J part and parcel of the historical profession to show that what initially may have seemed to be outsidethe grasp of history is, if one looks hard enough, also part of a historicalevolution.' Ankersmit F., The Sublime Dissociation of the Past. Or How toBe(come) What One is no Longer. In History and Theory, 40 (2001), 3, pp.295-323,299.

Still, historians do not always seem to have made up the avant garde ofthe historicist worldview. Many historians seek trans-historical frames tohelp them anchor the historical process. For a discussion on the search forthe absolute or unchanging within the transient, see Roshwald M., Perceptions of History. In Pursuit of the Absolute in Passing Time. In Diogenes, 47(1999),2, pp. 44-63.

32. Mannheim, Historicism, p. 85.33. Ibid., p. 127.34. Ibid., p. 85.35. Ankersmit F. R., Historicism. An Attempt at Synthesis. In History and The

ory, 34 (1995), 3, pp. 143-161,145.

Notes 203

Ankersmit in fact tries to make a synthesis of two accounts of historicism. The second account he discusses is of mainly Anglo Saxon origin andexplains historicism as a reaction to the centrality of rhetoric in Enlightenment historiography and as an attempt to base the writing of history on historical facts rather than on literary conventions. I only discuss Ankersmit'sfirst account of historicism here.

36. Ankersmit, Historicism, p. 147.37. Ibid., p. 152.38. Rotenstreich N., Time and Meaning in History. Dordrecht, D. Reidel Pub

lishing Company, 1987, p. 31.39. Agamben, Time and History, p. 96.40. Rorty R., Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge, Cambridge Uni

versity Press, 1989, plO. (Italics in the original)41. Foucault M., Nietzsche, Genealogy, History. In Bouchard D. F., Language,

Counter-Memory, Practice. Selected Essays and Interviews. New York,Cornell University, 1977, pp. 139-163, 153.

42. See, for example, Margolis J., The Flux of History and the Flux of Science.Berkeley, University of California, 1993.

43. Roberts D. D., Nothing but History. Berkeley, University of California Press,1995.

44. Osborne P., Modernity Is a Qualitative, Not a Chronological, Category. InNew Left Review, 192 (1992), pp. 65-84.

45. De Man P., Literary History and Literary Modernity. In Blindness andInsight. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1983, p. 144.

Aleida Assmann makes a similar distinction when she contrasts a time ofmodernity [Zeit der Moderne] and a time of remembrance [Zeit des Gedachtnisses]. Assmann A., Kulturelle Zeitgestalten. In Stadler F. & St6ltzner M.,Time and History. Proceeding of the 28 International Ludwig WittgensteinSymposium. Heusenstamm, Ontos Verlag, 2007, pp. 469-489.

46. Frisby D., Fragments of Modernity. Theories of Modernity in the Work ofSimmel, Kracauer and Ben;amin. Cambridge, Polity Press, 1985, pp. 14-16.

47. Habermas, Modernity's Consciousness of Time, p. 5.48. From this perspective, it can be argued that post-modernism is an archetypi

cal form of modernism.49. Habermas, Modernity's Consciousness of Time, p. 7.50. Koselleck R., Futures Past. On the Semalttics of Historical Time. New York,

Columbia University Press, 2004.51. Ibid., p. 264.52. Koselleck R., The Practice of Conceptual History. Timing History. Spacing

Concepts. Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2002, p. 111.53. Ibid., p. 111.54. Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 265.55. Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History, p. 165.56. Ibid., p. 152.57. Koselleck, Futures Past, pp. 267-268.58. Koselleck R., The Practice of Conceptual History, p. 120.59. Ibid.60. Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 194.61. Davis K., Periodization and Sovereignity. How Ideas of Feudalism and Sec

ularization Govern the Politics of Time. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.

62. Ibid., p. 90.63. Expression from Lowenthal D., The Past Is a Foreign Country. Cambridge,

Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 232.

204 Notes

64. Hunt L., Measurillg Time, Makillg History. Budapest, Central EuropeanUniversity Press, 2008, p. 26.

Others have situated the roots of the modern historical time even earlier, in the period of the Renaissance. Still, these thinkers generally do notdeny that the period around the end of the eighteenth century also broughtimportant changes in the concept of time. See Baron H., Das Erwachen deshistorischen Denkens im Humanismus des Quattrocento. In HistorischeZeitschrift, 147 (1933), 1, pp. 5-20. Ermarth E. D., Sequel to History. Postmodemism alld the Crisis of Represelltatiollal Time. Princeton, PrincetonUniversity Press, 1992. Fasolt c., The Limits ofHistory. Chicago, Universityof Chicago Press, 2004.

65. Hartog F., Regimes d'historicite. Preselltisme et experiellces du temps. Paris,Seuil, 2003.

66. Ibid., p. 99.67. Fritzsche P., Stranded in the Presellt. Modem Time and the Melancholy of

History. Cambridge (Mass.), Harvard University Press, 2004.68. Ibid., p. 53.69. Lowith K., Meallillg ill History. The Theological Implicatiolls of the Philoso

phy of History. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1949. Blumenberg H.,The Legitimacy of the Modem Age. Cambridge (Mass.), MIT Press, 1985.

70. Taylor c., Modem Social Imaginaries. Durham, Duke University Press,2004, p. 93.

71. Taylor c., Die Moderne und die siikulare Zeit. In Michalski K., Am Elidedes Millenlliums. Zeit und Modemitatell. Stuttgart, Klett-Cotta, 2000, pp.28-85. Taylor c., A Secular Age. Cambridge (Mass.), The Belknap Press ofHarvard University Press, 2007.

72. Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 55.73. Taylor, Modem Social Imaginaries, p. 97.74. Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 54.75. Ibid., p. 56.76. Ibid., p. 57.

On this subject, also see Gauchet M., The Disellchantmellt of the world.A Political History of Religioll. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1997.

77. Taylor, Modem Social Imagillaries, p. 97.78. An analysis of the relation between historical time and disenchantment

very similar to the one of Charles Taylor can be found in the work of IpeshChakrabarty. Chakrabarty D., Provillcializillg Europe. Postcolollial Thoughtalld Historical Differellce. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2008, pp.74 and 89.

79. Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 209.80. Ibid., p. 55.81. Agacinski S., Time Passing. Modemity alld Nostalgia. New York, Columbia

University Press, 2003.82. Mannheim, Historicism, pp. 84-85. Gadamer H. G., The Problem of His

torical Consciousness. In Rabinow P. & Sullivan W. M., IlIterpretive SocialSciellce. A Secolld Look. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1987, pp.82-140,89.

83. Rorty, COlltillgellCY, IrollY, alld Solidarity, p. xiii.84. Ibid., p. xvi. (Italics in the original)85. Wilcox, The Measure of Times Past.86. Ermarth E. D., Beyond the 'Subject.' In ]enkins K. & Munslow A., The

Nature of History Reader. Routledge, 2004, pp. 281-295.Meyer Schapiro, cited in Ermarth, Sequel to History, p. 5.

87. Wilcox, The Measure of Times Past, p. 4.

Notes 205

88. Discussed in Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 271.Bernard Williams is in fact discussing a change in the conception of tem

porality that took place in ancient historiography between Herodotus andThucydides, but Charles Taylor argues that a similar process of homogenization took place in the eighteenth century.

89. Hunt, Measurillg Time, Makillg History, pp. 28-29.90. Chakrabarty, Provillcializillg Europe. Nandy A., History's Forgotten Dou

bles. In History alld Theory, 34 (1995), 2, pp. 44-66. Seth S., Reason orReasoning? Clio or Siva? In Social Text, 78 (2004), 1, pp. 85-101,86. Alsosee Skaria A., Some Aporias of History. Time, Truth and Play in Dangs,Gujarat. In Economic alld Political Weekly, April 10, 1999, pp. 897-904.

91. See, for example, Archer M. S. Realist Social Theory. The MophogelleticApproach. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995. Giddens A., TheCOllstitutioll of Society. Outlille of the Theory ofStructuratioll. Cambridge,Polity Press, 1984.

92. RiisenJ., Mourning by History. Ideas of a New Element in Historical Thinking. In Historiography East & West, 1 (2003), 1, pp. 15-38, 21. Also seeRiisen J., Historical Thinking as Intercultural Discourse. In Riisen J., Westem Historical Thillkillg. All Intercultural Debate. New York, BerghahnBooks, 2002, pp. 1-11.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 6

1. Teichmann R., The Complete Description of Temporal Reality. In Baert P.,Time ill Colltemporary IlItellectual Thought. Amsterdam, Elsevier, 2000, pp.1-15. Adam B., Time alld Social Theory. Cambridge, Polity Press, 1990.

Einstein is reported to have once said that, 'the experience of the Nowmeans something special for man, something essentially different from thepast and the future, but that this important difference does not and cannotoccur within physics.' Quoted in Tooley M., Time, Tellse alld Causation.New York, Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 380.

2. Eliade M., The Myth of the Etemal Retum. New York, Bollingen Foundation, 1954.

3. Braudel F., La mediterrallee et le monde mediterra/l(!eII Cl l'epoque de PhilippeII. Paris, Armand Colin, 1949.

In what follows is cited in its English translation Braudel F., The Mediterralleall and the Mediterralleall World ill the Age of Philip II (translated SianReynolds; 2 volumes). New York, Harper and Row,1972-1974.

4. Braudel, The Mediterralleall, p. 20.5. Ibid., p. 21.6. I am referring primarily to the essays 'Histoire et sciences sociales. La longue

dun~e,' 'Unite et diversite des sciences de I'homme,' and 'Histoire et sociologie,' which originally appeared between 1958 and 1960 but were collected inthe book Ecrits sur l'histoire (Paris, Flammarion, 1969). Below I refer to theEnglish translation of this compilation by Sarah Matthews (unless otherwiseindicated): Braudel F., 011 History. Chicago, University of Chicago Press,1980.

7. Braudel, 011 History, p. 28.8. Ibid., p. 31.9. Ibid., p. 33.

10. Olivia Harris speaks about Braudel's 'horror of discontinuity.' Harris 0.,Braudel. Historical Time and the Horror of Discontinuity. In History Workshop joumal, 57 (2004), pp. 161-174.

206 Notes

11. Braudel, On History, p. 67.12. Here I opt for a translation that slightly differs from that of Sarah Matthews.

She translates the French word actualite as 'current event,' but I prefer theliteral translation 'actuality' because it is more closely related to the notion of'historical present' to which the term actualite in this context clearly refers.The original sentence reads: 'Chaque "actualite" rassemble des mouvementsd'origine, de rythme differents: le temps d'aujourd'hui date it la fois d'hier,d'avant-hier, de jadis.' Braudel, Ecrits sur L'histoire, p. 56.

13. Cited in Schwarz B., Already the Past. Memory and Historical Time. In Radstone S. & Hodgkin K., Regimes of Memory. London, Routledge, 2003, pp.135-151,135.

14. Braudel, The Mediterranean, p. 17.15. Braudel E, Personal Testimony. In The Journal of Modern History, 44

(1972),4, pp. 448-467, 452.16. Ibid., p. 454. ,17. Ricoeur P., Time and Narrative (Volume 1). Chicago, University of Chicago

Press, 1990, p. 103.18. Braudel, On History, p. 26.19. Ibid., p. 28.20. Ibid., p. 35.21. Ibid., p. 69.22. Ibid., p. 48.23. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (Volume 1), p. 104.24. This lack of explicitation enabled Paul Ricoeur to claim that Braudel's Medi

terranee, in contrast to what the latter himself asserted, did evolve arounda narrative emplotment based on historical events, although differing fromwhat Braudel himself would have understood under the notion of event. SeeRicoeur, Time and Narrative (Volume 1), p. 215.

25. Lundmark L., The Historian's Time. In Time alld Society, 2 (1993), 1, pp.61-74,62.

26. Dray W. H., History as Re-enactment. R. G. Collillgwood's Idea ofHistory.New York, Oxford University Press, 1995, pp. 52-54.

27. Collingwood R. G., Notes on Historiography. In Dray W. H. & van derDussen W. j., The Principles of History. And Other Writings ill PhilosophyofHistory. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 235-250, 245.

28. Collingwood R. G., History as Re-enactment of Past Experience. In Collingwood R. G., The Idea ofHistory. Revised Edition with Lectures 1926-1928(ed. and intro by Jan van der Dussen). Oxford, Oxford University Press,1993, p. 282.

29. Collingwood R. G., Human Nature and Human History. In The Idea ofHis-tory, p. 213.

30. Ibid.31. Ibid.32. Ibid.33. Collingwood, History as Re-enactment, p. 283.34. Collingwood, Human Nature and Human History, p. 215.35. Collingwood, History as Re-enactment, pp. 283-287.36. Collingwood R. G., Outlines of a Philosophy of History [1928]. In The Idea

of History, pp. 426-496, 444.37. Collingwood R. G., Some Perplexities about Time. With an Attempted Solu

tion. In Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 26 (1925-1926), pp. 135150.

38. Ibid., p. 148. (Italics in the original)39. Ihid., p. 150. (Italics in the original)

Notes 207

40. Editor's introduction. In The idea of History, p. xliv.41. Collingwood, Human Nature and Human History, p. 211.42. Collingwood R. G., The Principles of History. In The Principles of History,

pp. 1-115,58.43. Collingwood R. G., Notes Toward a Metaphysic. In The Principles of His

tory, pp. 119-139, 130. (Italics in the original)Note that Collingwood in the Perplexities artide still held the view that the

past generally could be seen as a pre-condition of the present; he had not yetexplicitly made the differentiation between a natural and a historical past.

44. Collingwood, Notes on Historiography, p. 245.45. Collingwood, Human Nature and Human History, p. 218.46. Collingwood, Outline of a Philosophy of History, p. 447.47. Collingwood, Notes on the History of Historiography and Philosophy of His-

tory. In The Principles of History, pp. 219-234, 222. (Italics in the original)48. Ibid.49. Collingwood, Notes Toward a Metaphysic, p. 132. (Italics in the original)50. Negt 0., The Non-Synchronous Heritage and the Problem of Propaganda. In

New German Critique, 9 (1976), pp. 46-70, 59.51. Geoghegan V., Ernst Bloch. London, Routledge, 1996.52. Jay M., Marxism and Totality. The Adventures ofa Concept from Lukdcs to

Habermas. Cambridge, Polity Press, 1984, pp. 180-182.53. Several translations of the term Ungleichzeitigkeit are in use: Some speak

about 'non-contemporaneity,' others about 'non-synchronism,' and still others about 'non-simultaneity.' For each of these translations, an equal amountof pro- and contra-arguments can be found. I opt for non-contemporaneitysimply because it is most commonly used.

54. Durst D. c., Ernst Bloch's Theory of Nonsimultaneity. In The GermanicReview, 77 (2002), 3, pp. 171-194.

55. Jay, Marxism and Totality, p. 182.56. Bloch E., A Philosophy of the Future. New York, Herder and Herder, 1970,

pp. 120-122.57. In what follows, I will cite the English translation by Neville and Stephen

Plaice: Bloch E., Heritage of Our Times. Cambridge, Polity Press, 1991.58. Rabinbach A., Unclaimed Heritage. Ernst Bloch's Heritage of Our Times and

the Theory of Fascism. In New Germall Critique, 11 (1977), pp. 5-21, 5-6.59. Bloch, Heritage of Our Times, pp. 1-2.60. Ibid., p. 62. (Italics in the original)61. Ihid., p. 97.62. Ibid.63. Ibid., p. 99.64. Ibid., p. 101.65. Ibid.66. Ibid., p. 113.67. Althusser L., For Marx. London, NLB, 1977, p. 93. (Italics in the original)68. Althusser borrowed this notion from Freud. Ibid., p. 101.69. Ibid.70. Althusser L. & Balibar E., Reading Capital. London, Verso, 1979, p. 94.71. Ibid., p. 94. (Italics in the original)72. One should of course not necessarily accept Althusser's reading of the intel

lectual relation between Hegel and Marx. Alvin Gouldner, for example, incontrast to Althusser, stresses that Marx's notion of totality was modeledafter Hegel's example. Gouldner A., Against Fragmentation. New York:Oxford University Press, 1985, p. 271.

73. Ibid., p. 101. (Italics in the original)

208 Notes

74. Ibid., p. 107. (Italics in the original)75. Ibid., p. 108. (Italics in the original)76. Ibid.77. Althusser, For Marx, p. 114.78. Ibid., p. 115.79. Ibid., p. 113.80. Althusser & Balibar, Reading Capital, p. 96. (Italics in the original)81. Ibid.82. Jay, Marxism and Totality, p. 407.

Actually, this accusation of sl!bverting the Marxist notion of totality wasformulated against Althusser by E. P. Thompson. Thompson E. P., The Poverty of Theory. London, Merlin, 1978, p. 289.

83. Althusser, For Marx, p. 113.84. Bloch, Heritage of Our Times, p. 114.85. Ibid., p. 109. (Italics in the original)86. Ibid., p. 105.87. I think this is what Michael Bentley refers to when he criticizes Ernst Bloch's

notion of the non-contemporaneity of the contemporaneous, about whichhe writes that it 'looks like a manifesto for presence; but it functioned as atectonic understanding of time in which temporal structures slid spatiallyunder one another and created false, retarding presences.' Bentley M., Pastand 'Presence.' Revisiting Historical Ontology. In History and Theory, 45(2006), pp. 349-361, 353.

88. Fabian J., Time and the Other. How Anthropology Makes Its Object. NewYork, Columbia University Press, 1983.

89. Ibid., p. 31. (Italics in the original)

NOTES TO CHAPTER 7

1. Bennington G., Demanding History. In Attridge D., Bennington G., & YoungR., Post-structuralism and the Question of History. Cambridge, CambridgeUniversity Press, 1987, p. 17.

2. Evans R. J., In Defense of History. New York, W. W. Norton & Company,1999.

3. In an interview, Derrida warns that the notion of history can always be reappropriated by metaphysics, and he stresses that he rejects historicism. Healso says he always subscribed to Althusser's criticism with regard to theHegelian concept of history. Derrida j., Positions. Interview with Jean-LouisHoudebine and Guy Scarpetta. In Positiolls. London, Continuum, 2002, pp.37-78,50.

Another important influence on Derrida's notion of history came fromEdmond Husserl's Origin of Geometry-a work in which Husserl criticizestraditional historicism. See Derrida T., Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry. An Introduction. Lincoln, Uni':ersity of Nebraska Press, 1989.

4. Derrida stresses that his critique is directed only against a certain metaphysical conception of history. If he attacks the 'archeo-teleological' concept ofhistory, it is only to show how it neutralizes or even cancels historicity. Derrida J., Specters ofMarx. The State of the Debt, the Work ofMourning, andthe New Illternational. New York, Routledge, 1994, p. 75.

5. Ibid., 101.6. Derrida made this promise in an interview with the French Marxists Jean

Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta in 1971. See Derrida, Positions, p. 54.7. Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 52.

Notes 209

8. Ibid., p. 56.9. Ibid., p. 85.

10. Ibid., p. 37.11. Derrida remarks that Marx's spectral language often disappears in trans

lation. This is, for example, the case in the passage from 'The EighteenthBrumaire,' where Marx writes that 'the tradition of all the dead generationsweighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.' In the German original,Marx writes lastet wie ein Alp, which according to Derrida should literallybe translated as 'weighs like one of those ghosts that give nightmares.' In theFrench translation, too, the specter is replaced by the expression pese d'unpoids tres lourd. Ibid., p. 108.

12. Ibid., p. 150.13. Ibid., p. 47.14. Ibid., p. 170.15. See, for example, Ahmad A., Reconciling Derrida. 'Specters of Marx' and

Deconstructive Politics. In Sprinker, Ghostly Demarcations, pp. 88-109.Calcagno A., Badiou and Derrida. Politics, Events alld Their Time. London,Continuum, 2007.

16. Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 10.17. Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 54.18. Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 92.19. Ibid., p. 51.20. One should indeed consider the specter to belong to a set of concepts that

Derrida himself calls 'undecidables,' 'which escape from inclusion in thephilosophical (binary) opposition and which nonetheless inhabit it, resistand disorganize it, but without ever constituting a third term, without everoccasioning a solution in the form of speculative dialectics.' Derrida, Positions, p. 36.

Derrida describes the spectral as 'what happens between two, and betweenall the "two's" , or, alternatively, 'the more than one/no more one [le plusd'un].' Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. xviii.

21. Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. xix. (Italics in the original)22. Ibid., p. xix. (Italics in the original)23. Ibid., p. 7.24. Ibid., p. xix.25. Derrida j., Speech and Phenomena. And Other Essays 0/1 Husserl's Theory

of Signs. Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1973, p. 99.Also see Derrida J., Of Grammatology. CorrecJed Editioll. Baltimore,

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997, p. 12.26. Derrida J., Differance. In Margins of Philosophy, pp. 1-27, 10.27. Ibid., p. 13.28. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 8. (Italics in the original)29. Derrida, Differance, p. 16.30. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, p. 60. (Italics in the original)31. Ibid., p. 61. (Italics in the original)32. Robert Bernasconi, in Reynolds J. & Roffe j., Understanding Derrida. New

York, Continuum, 2004, p. 124.33. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, pp. 64-65. (Italics in the original)34. Derrida is clear about the fact that time can never be considered 'absolutely

subjective' 'precisely because it cannot be conceived on the basis of a presentand the self-presence of a present being.' Ibid., p. 86.

35. Derrida ]., Ousia and Gramme. Note on a Note from Being and Time. InMargins of Philosophy. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1982, pp.31-67,31.

210 Notes

36. Derrida, Ousia and Gramme, 47.37. Ibid., p. 63.

On this metaphysical 'trap' into which Heidegger remains caught, alsosee Derrida's essay, 'The Ends of Man.' Here Derrida argues that Heideggerdoes not radically break with presence and that his philosophy, despite hisrepeated criticism of humanism, eventually remains humanist. Derrida J.,The Ends of Man. In Margills of Philosophy, pp. 109-136, 128.

38. Derrida, Positiolls, p. 41.Although this seems to be a very negative evaluation, Herman Rapaport

remarks that Derrida has, in fact, taken many different positions on Heidegger, sometimes stressing the close relation between the latter's intellectualproject and that of deconstruction, at other times warning against any confusion between deconstruction and Heideggerian thought. Rapaport H.,Heidegger & Derrida. Reflectiolls 011 Time alld Lallguage. Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1989, pp. 7-10.

39. Derrida, Ousia and Gramme, p. 47.40. Ibid., pp. 54-55. (Italics in the original)41. Ibid., p. 55.42. Ibid., p. 55. (Italics in the original)43. Ibid., p. 56.44. Ibid., p. 67.45. Derrida, Differance, p. 21. (Italics in the original)46. Citation from Derrida, Differance, p. 13.47. Other prominent themes in Derrida's later work are equally firmly based on

this deconstruction of time. This is, for example, the case with his reflection on the 'gift.' The true gift that produces no debt and does not demanda counter-gift, according to Derrida, can only be thought of on the basis ofa deconstrucred time. As Derrida puts it, 'In any case, time, the "present"of the gift, is no longer thinkable as a now, that is, as a present bound up inthe temporal synthesis.' According to Derrida, it is no coincidence that thegift in both English and French is referred to with the term 'present,' for heclaims that 'The gift is not a gift, the gift only gives to the extent it givestime. The difference between a gift and every other operation of pure andsimple exchange is that the gift gives time. There where there is gift, there istime.' Derrida.J., Givell Time: I. Coullterfeit MolZey. Chicago, University ofChicago Press, 1994, pp. 9-14,41.

48. Jameson F., Marx's Purloined Letter. In New Left Review, 209 (1995), pp.75-109,85-86.

49. Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 99.50. Derrida, Speech alld Phellomella, pp. 62-63. (Italics in the original)51. Derrida J., Marx & Sons. In Sprinker M., Ghostly Demarcatiolls. A Sym

posium 011 ]acques Derrida's Specters of Marx. London, Verso, 1999, pp.213-269, 245.

According to some commentators, however, Derrida's reevaluation ofthe spectral rather makes it impossible to criticise phenomena as idealization, ideologization, or fetishization or to differentiate between radicalismand conservatism any longer. For such a critique, see Cohen S., Derrida's'New Scholar.' Between Philosophy and History. In Cohen S., History Outof]oillt. Essays 011 the Use alld Abuse of History. Baltimore, Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 2006, pp. 153-181.

52. Montag W., Spirits Armed and Unarmed. Derrida's Specters of Marx. InSprinker, Ghostly Demarcatiolls, pp. 71-74.

53. Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 19.54. Ibid.

Notes 211

55. Derrida, Specters of Marx, pp. 21-27.56. Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 23.57. Cited in Derrida J., Archive Fever. A Freudiall Impressioll. Chicago, Univer

sity of Chicago Press, 1996, p. 77.58. Fritsch M., The Promise of Memory. History alld Politics ill Marx, Bellja

mill, alld Derrida. Albany, State University of New York Press, 2005.59. Cohen S., Derrida's 'New Scholar,' pp. 169-170.60. Wood D., The Decollstructioll of Time. Atlantic Highlands, Humanities

Press International, 1989.61. Ibid., p. 274.62. Ibid.63. Ibid., pp. 274-275. (Italics in the original)

NOTES TO CHAPTER 8

1. From thesis VI. In Benjamin W., Theses on the Philosophy of History. InBenjamin W., Illumillatiolls. New York, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968,pp. 253-264, 255.

2. LaCapra D., History alld Memory after Auschwitz. Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1998. Also see LaCapra D., Writillg History, Writillg Trauma.Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. LaCapra D., History illTrallsit. Experiellce, Idelltity, Critical Theory. Ithaca, Cornel! UniversityPress, 2004.

3. Riisen J., Mourning by History-Ideas of a New Element in HistoricalThinking. In Historiography East & West, 1 (2003),1, pp. 15-38, 18.

4. Domanska E., Toward the Archaeontology of the Dead Body. In RethillkillgHistory, 9 (2005),4, pp. 389-413, 398.

5. De Certeau M., The Writillg of History. New York, Columbia UniversityPress, 1988, p. 7.

6. In making a distinction between 'loss' and 'absence,' I am inspired by thework of Dominick LaCapra. Referring to post-conflict situations as the oneof Germany after World War II and South Africa after Apartheid, LaCapraargues that it is very important to distinguish between the concepts of loss andabsence. This distinction is important because a confusion of the two can leadto a confusion between 'historical traumas' that are related to loss caused byconcrete historical events and can effectively be 'worked through' and 'structural' or 'trans-historical' traumas that can never be remedied because theyare related to indefinite experiences of lack or of the 'absence of metaphysicalfoundations. One should resist the tendency to treat even the most horrendous historical atrocities in terms of a generalized discourse of (metaphysical) absence. Conversely, the absence of ultimate metaphysical foundationscannot legitimately be traced back to any concrete historical losses, howevertraumatic they may be. To cite LaCapra, 'When absence is converted into loss,one increases the likelihood of misplaced nostalgia or utopian politics in questof a new totality or fully unified community. When loss is converted into (orencrypted in an indiscriminately generalized rhetoric of) absence, one facesthe impasse of endless melancholy, impossible mourning, and interminableaporia in which any process of working through the past and its historicallosses is foreclosed or prematurely aborted.' LaCapra D., Trauma, Absence,Loss. In Critical Illquiry, 25 (1999), 4, pp. 696-727, 698.

Although I am inspired by LaCapra's analytical distinction, it is importantto notice that my use of the terms loss and absellce differs considerably fromthat of LaCapra. When speaking about 'absence,' for example, I refer not to

212 Notes

the absence of metaphysical foundations (such as that of an original community) but, instead, to the use of this term as the antonym of presence.

7. Freud S., Mourning and Melancholia. In Strachey J., The Sta1tdard Editionof the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmu1td Freud (Volume 14). London, the Hogarth Press, 1953-1974, pp. 243-258, 243.

8. Volkan V. D., Not Letting Go. From Individual Perennial Mourners to Societies with Entitlement Ideologies. In Glocer Fiorini L., Bokanowski T., &Lewkowics S., On Freud's 'Mourni1tg and Melancholia.' London, The International Psychoanalytical Association, 2007, p. 91.

9. Freud, Mourni1tg a1td Mela1tcholia, p. 244.10. Ibid., p. 245.11. Ibid., p. 246.12. Freud S., The Ego and the Id. In The Sta1tdard Editio1t, Vol. XIX, pp.

12-66.13. Freud, The Ego and the Id, p. 28.14. Bergmann M. S., Introduction. In Glocer Fiorini, Bokanowski, & Lewkow

ics, 01t Freud's 'Mourning a1td Mela1tcholia,' pp. 1-15,8.15. Homans P., Symbolic Loss. The Ambiguity of Mourni1tg a1td Memory at

Century's E1td. Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 2000, pp. 6-9.This characterization of modern Western practices of mourning, of course,

does not imply that there are no manifestations of collective mourning in theWestern world anymore. Rather, sociologists remark that the task of mourning in common situations (the 'natural' death of a relative, for example) is nolonger regulated publicly and that it has come to be treated as the responsibility of the individual.

16. Hertz R., Death and the Right Hand. Aberdeen, Cohen & West, 1960, p. 27.The expression 'non-modern' is mine, of course; Hertz mostly uses the

term primitive to refer to the mourning rituals he describes.17. Ibid., p. 28.18. Ibid., p. 34.19. Ibid., pp. 36-37.20. van Gennep A., The Rites of Passage. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul,

1977.21. Ibid., pp. 146-147.22. See, for example, Klass D., Silverman P. R., & Nickman S. L., Co1ttinu

i1tg Bonds. New Understandings of Grief. Philadelphia, Taylor and Francis,1996. Waiter T., A New Model of Grief. Bereavement and Biography. InMortality,1 (1996), 1, pp. 7-25.

23. Klass D., Silverman P. R., & Nickman S. L., Preface. In Klass, Silverman, &Nickman, Co1ttinuing Bonds, pp. xvii-xxi, xviii.

24. Silverman P. R. & Klass D., Introduction. What's the Problem? In Klass,Silverman, & Nickman, Continuing Bonds, pp. 3-27,4.

25. Tony Waiter, cited in Small N., Theories of Grief. A Critical Review. InHockey J., Katz J., & Small N., Grief, Mourni1tg and Death Ritual. Buckingham, Open University Press, 2001, pp. 19-48,34.

26. Richard Terdiman, for example, claims that 'No modern theory of individualaction or cultural process has made more of memory than Freud's. None hasconceived the preservation of the past as more problematic in the present.'Terdiman R., Present Past. Modernity and the Memory Crisis. Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1993, p. 242.

Michel de Certeau argues that modern historiography and psychoanalysisare based on opposite chronosophies or what he calls 'strategies of time.'Although historiography is based on a clean break between past and present,de Certeau argues, 'psychoanalysis recognizes the past in the present.' De

Notes 213

Certeau M., Heterologies. Discourse on the Other. Minneapolis, Universityof Minnesota Press, 2006, p. 4. (Italics in the original)

27. Often, however, this presumed link between the theory of Nachtriiglichkeitand the redefinition of notions of time and causality is based on a misreadingof Freud's theory. For a critical reflection on Freud's concept of Nachtriiglichkeit and the many different ways in which it has been interpreted by others, see Thoma H. & Cheshire N., Freud's Nachtriiglichkeit and Strachey's'Deferred Action.' Trauma, Constructions and the Direction of Causality. InInternational Review of Psycho-Analysis, 18 (1991), pp. 407-427.

28. Freud S., Thoughts for the Times on War and Death. In The stalldard Editio1t, Vo!' XIV, pp. 273-302.

29. Ibid., pp. 285-286.30. Freud S., On Transience. In The standard Edition, Vo!' XIV, pp. 305-307,

306.31. Freud does not stand alone with this psychologization of haunting. His

approach fits into a broader intellectual trend that already started with eighteenth-century rationalism that attempted to abolish the belief in ghosts by'psychologizing' them and considering them as a product of the human mind.Terry Castle has referred to this process as Enlightenment's 'invention ofthe uncanny.' Cited in Davis c., Haunted Subjects. Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis alld the Return of the Dead. New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007,p.7.

32. Freud S., Totem and Taboo. Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics. In The standard Editio1t, Vo!' XIII, pp.3-200,24.

33. Spargo R. c., The Ethics of Mourning. Grief alld Responsibility in ElegiacLiterature. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004, p. 4.

34. Most of Derrida's commemorative texts are collected in Derrida J., The Workof Mourning (eds. P. A. Brault & M. Naas). Chicago, University of ChicagoPress, 2001.

A longer essay dedicated to the memory of Hans-Georg Gadamer waspublished separately as Derrida J., Beliers: le dialogue iniltterrompu entredeux in(inis, le poeme. Paris, Editions Galilee, 2003.

An excerpt from this essay has been translated as Derrida J., Uninterrupted Dialogue. Between two Infinities, the Poem. In Research in Phenomellology, 34 (2004), pp. 3-19.

35. Naas M., History's Remains. Of Memory, Mourning, and the Event. InResearch in Phenomenology, 33 (2003), pp. 75-96, 77.

36. Derrida J., The Time Is Out of Joint. In Haverkamp A., Deconstruction IsIin America. A New Sense of the Political. New York, New York UniversityPress, 1995, pp. 14-37,21.

37. Derrida, The Work of Mourning, p. 159.38. Derrida J., Memoires for Paul de Man. New York, Columbia University

Press, 1986, p. 34. (Italics in the original)39. Derrida]., Fors. The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok.

(Foreword) In Abraham N. & Torok M., The Wolf Man's Magic Word. ACryptonymy. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1986, pp. xixlviii, xvii.

The expression 'psychic plagiarism' is taken from Kirkby J., 'Remembrance of the Future.' Derrida on Mourning. In Social Semiotics, 16 (2006),3, pp. 461-472,470.

40. Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, p. 6. (Italics in the original)41. Derrida J., Aporias. Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1993, pp. 61-62.42. Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, p. 21.

214 Notes

43. Ibid., p. 28.44. Ibid., p. 33. (Italics in the original)45. Ibid., p. 22.46. Derrida, The Work of Mourning, p. 159.

Derrida's reorganization of the topology of mourning closely relates toa theory about the 'power of the image' that he draws from Louis Marin.Because of spatial concerns, I cannot address this theory here. Let me sketchthe relation between mourning and the image in Derrida's thought in justa few lines. The entire discourse of mourning that speaks about an insideand an outside, an 'in us,' or about a certain visibility (what Derrida callsa 'geometry of gazes'), according to Derrida is dependent on the idea thatthe dead only survive as images. As Derrida explains, 'We are speaking ofimages. What is only ill us seems to be reducible to images, which might bememories or monuments, but which are reducible in any case to a memorythat consists of visible scenes that are no longer anything but images, sincethe other of whom they are the images appears only as the one who hasdisappeared or passed away, as the one who, having passed away, leaves "inus" only images.' In order to rethink mourning, Derrida argues, one has tobreak with the ontological tradition that tends to ascribe an inferior statusto the image (in relation to the 'original' object or person that it depicts) andlearn to accept that 'the force of the image has to do less with the fact thatone sees something in it than with the fact that one is seen there in it.' Afterhaving analyzed Louis Marin's theory of portraits, Derrida comes to thefollowing strange and radical conclusion: 'The image sees more than it isseen. The image looks at us.' Derrida, The Work ofMounting, pp. 159-161.(Italics in the original)

On Derrida's theory of the image, also see Saghafi K., The Ghost ofJacques Derrida. In Epoche, 10 (2006), 2, pp. 263-286.

Another interesting discussion on the relation between death and theimage can be found in the work of Robert Pogue Harrison. According toHarrison, funeral rites do not only, or ever primarily, aim at a ritual separation of the living and the dead but, in the first place, serve to separate theimage of the deceased from the corpse to which this image would otherwiseremain attached. As he puts it, 'Between the dead and the undead the essential difference lies in the release of the image.' Harrison R. P. The Dominionof the Dead. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2003, p. 148.

47. Derrida, The Work of Mourning, p. 44.48. Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, p. 22.49. Derrida, The Work of Mourning, p. 160.50. Ibid., p. 159.

Also see Derrida J., The Politics of Friendship. New York, Verso, 1997.Derrida, Uninterrupted Dialogue, p. 7.

51. Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, p. 28. (Italics in the original)52. Ibid., p. 34.53. Derrida, The Work of Mourning, p. 161. (Italics in the original)54. Richter G., Acts of Memory and Mourning. Derrida and the Fictions of

Anteriority. In Radstone S. & Schwarz B., Memory. Histories, Theories,Debates. New York, Fordham University Press, 2010.

55. Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, p. 37. (Italics in the original)56. Ibid., p. 49.57. Ibid., p. 54.58. Ibid., p. 49. (Italics in the original)59. Ibid., p. 58.

Notes 215

60. Derrida J., The Time Is Out of Joint. In Haverkamp A., Deconstruction IsIin America. A New Sense of the Political. New York, New York UniversityPress, 1995, pp. 14-38.

61. Ibid., p. 18.62. Ibid.63. Ibid., p. 20. (Italics in the original)64. Ibid., p. 30. (Italics in the original)

NOTES TO THE CONCLUSION

1. Borges J. L., A History of Eternity. In Borges J. L. & Weinberger E~, Borges:Selected Non-Fictions. New York, Penguin Books, 1999, pp. 123-139, 136.

2. When deconstructing the presence of the present, Derrida, of course, doesnot deny its existence: As he makes dear in an interview, 'Like anyone elsewho tries to be a philosopher, I do not want to give up either on the presentor on thinking the presence of the present.' Derrida J., The Deconstructionof Actuality. An Interview with Jacques Derrida. In Radical Philosophy, 68(1994), pp. 28-41, 30.

Rather Derrida takes this presence of the present to be a 'determination'or 'effect,' instead of being an absolute or primordial 'form of Being.' DerridaJ., Differance. In Margins of Philosophy. Chicago, University of ChicagoPress, 1982, pp. 1-27,16.

3. Ricoeur P., Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago, University of ChicagoPress, 2004, p. 238.

4. Ladau E., The Time Is out of Joint. In Diacritics, 25 (1995),2, pp. 86-97,93.

5. Todorov T., The Uses and Abuses of Memory. In Marchitello H., What Happens to History. The Renewal of Ethics in Contemporary Thought. Routledge, New York, 2001, p. 11.

6. Ladau, The Time Is out of Joint, p. 94.

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Index

Aabduction. See disappearanceabsence: 2, 3,4,5,39,40,58,87, 137,

143,148,150,150,155,156,172, 211 n6. See also past, asabsent

Abudara Bini, Oscar, 42accountability, 26,46,63, 144, 175Ackerman, Bruce, 8African National Congress, 46, 49,

50-52,54,56,61Agacinski, Sylviane, 106Agamben, Giorgio, 82, 84, 92, 98agency, 14, 141, 166Agosti, Orlando Ramon, 27Alexander, Samuel, 119Alfonsfn, Raul, 26-28, 32, 33, 34, 37,

38,41allochronism, 16,60,86-87,110,129,

130,131,169Althusser, Louis, 19, 111, 122, 125-

130,170Amery, Jean, 3, 6Amin, Idi Dada, 9amnesia: See forgettingamnesty: ix, 8, 12,24,26,37,38,

41,46,47,48,52-58,61,63,66,67,69,70,72,74-75,88,168; punto final and obedienciadebida laws (Argentina), 28, 29

anachronism, 12, 13,19,56,60,133,144, 169

anamnestic solidarity, 1, 175Anaya, Jorge, 28ANC. See African National Congressancestors, 80, 81, 86, 88, 87, 124, 148,

156. See also deadAnderson, Benedict, 15-16, 84Ankersmit, Frank, 18, 57, 97-98

Annales school, 114-115, 128Antigone,37Antokoletz, Marfa Adela, 32antropology, 17, 129-130aparici6n con vida (living appearance;

slogan), 23, 24, 38-43,45Apartheid: 7, 8, 17,46-48,49,50-53,

54,56,57,58,59,60,61,62,63,64, 76,171, 172; residual,50

apologies, 11, 76archives, 2, 5, 8,45,48; destruction of,

12, 26; South African HistoryArchive, 48; Stasi files; 8

Aries, Philippe, 37Aristotle, 93,140,141,144Asmal, Kader, 52-53, 56, 60atonement, 2; fin de millenaire fever

of,1 1Augustine, 105, 201n6Auschwitz, 3, 63

Bbackward causation, 5Balbfn, Ricardo, 40Balza, Martin, 29, 42Barrow, Isaac, 93Barthes, Roland, 160Baudelaire, Charles, 99Benjamin, WaIter, 1,2,6,92,144,147,

175Bennington, Geoff, 131, 144Bergmann, Martin, 150Bergson, Henri, 119Bloch, Ernst, 19, 111, 122-125, 126,

129,170Bloch, Marc, 114Blumenberg, Hans, 14; 104Bonadfo, Claudio, 29

242 Index

Bonafini, Hebe de, 23, 32, 34, 36, 37,43,45

Bonnefoy, Yves, 143Boraine, Alex, 7,46,47,53Borges, Jorge Luis, 43,168Botha, Pieter Willem, 51Braudel, Fernand, 19, 110,112-116,

128,170burial, 34, 35, 36,39, 79, 81,151;

double, 151-152; mass, 23, 27;rituals, 37, 79, 151; symbolical,34,42

CCabezas, Jose Luis, 44calendar, 16, 101, 165capitalism, 124, 125,129, 132, 142catastrophe, consciousness of, 14, 83catharsis, 56, 67, 72, 74, 144CELS. See Centro de Estudios Legales y

SocialesCentro de Estudios Legales y Sociales,

29,37,39Certeau, Michel de, 5,14,86,148change, historical, 18, 96-98, 100-101,

103,107,108-109,110,112,118,119-120,172 , 173

Cavallo, Gabriel, 29Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 108Chateaubriand, Fran<;ois Rene, 103Chesneaux, Jean, 43child soldiers, 68, 72, 81Christ, 92, 106Christianity, 16,40,92,95,101,105chronicle, 96chronology, 14,49,58-59,75,83,

85-85,92-94,99,103,106,108,110,118,120,164,165,169, 173. See also time,chronological

chronopolitics. See time (politics of)chronosophy, x, 5, 6,18,19,39,49,

92,93,107,108,109,110,111,115,116,122,127,128-130,135,144,170

civic trust, 10civic skills, 11cleansing rituals, 80, 88clocks, 3,16,94-95closure, 34, 40, 41, 56, 60, 79,162;

cathartic bliss of, 56; resistanceto, 45, 160

Cohen, Sande, 145

Collinwood, R. G., 19, 110, 116-122Colvin, Christopher, 62Comisi6n Nacional sobre la Desapa

rici6n de Personas. See truthcommiSSIOns

CONADEP. See truth commissionscommemoration. See remembrancecommodification, 134conflict management, 11constitution, interim (South Africa), 52,

56-58contemporaneity, 12, 104, 108,

123-124,126,129,-130,140;civic, 84, 87; eternal, 14; falsevs. genuine, 125; historical,111, 126, 127; objective vs.subjective, 125, 129. See alsopresent, contemporaneous; time,conteporaneous

corpses. See dead (bodies)criminal: courts, 9; law, 7, 9; prosecu

tions, 9. See also justice, criminalCroce, Benedetto, 118

DDating, 173; absolute, 94; BC/AD, 93;

relative, 94. See also chronologyDavis, Kathleen, 102dead,2,5,23,26,33,34,35,37,39,

40,41,42,43,51,79,86,118,132,134,135,135,144,147,152-157,158,159-161,165,166; appeasement of, 79; bodies,25,33,35,36,38,39,41,152,153,147,150; living, 44,103;presence of, 148; fidelity to, 1,157,158-159; returning, 87, 88,131,133. See also past, as dead

death, 23-24, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39,40,41,43,86,104,121,133,134,144, 147-148, 151-157,158-161,163-166; as a mastermetaphor, 45,148; as destruction, 12, 152; as non-response,163; as transition, 152-153,165; contagious, 152; denial of,24; discourse of, 147; event(ness)of, 160, 165; guardians of, 24;instantaneous, 151; physical, 164

deconstruction, 111, 130, 131, 132,134,135,136,139,143,144,158,160,161,164, 172, 174,175

Deeds Ermarth, Elisabeth, 107Derrida, Jacques, 3, 19,48,86, 111,

130,131-146,148,157,158-167

desaparecidos, 17,24,25-27,31,32,33-38,39-42,44,45,87,148;social, 44; political, 44

Descartes, Rene, 93detachment and attachment, psycho

logical, 149-150, 153-154, 157,159, 162

devil's choice, 7. See also transitionaljustice dilemma

diachrony, 126, 127dialectics (HegelianlMarxist), 85, 115,

116,122,123,125-126,128,129, 142

differance, 131, 137, 142, 145, 146,171

Dilthey, Wilhelm, 96dirty war, 17,25,28,29,36,40,41,42disappearance, 23, 27, 30, 31, 35,

39,173, 184n17. See alsodesaparecidos

disenchantment, 18, 106distance/distancing, x, 2, 4, 5, 13, 14,

15,36,56,57,63,65,67,80,82,83,84,87,113,114,118,165, 168, 169, 173, 177n6; distance constructions, 15; distancing devices, 130. See also past,as distant

documento final. See Final Documenton the War Against Subversionand Terrorism

Domanska, Ewa, 147Dray, William, 117Duration, 85, 93, 128, dialectics of,

115-116; longue, moyenne, andcourte duree, 112;

Dussen, Jan van der, 119duty to remember. See remembranceDoxtader, Erik, 54Droysen, Johann Gustav, 98

EEAAF. See Equipo Argentino de

Antropologfa ForenseEinstein, Albert, 93Eliade, Mircea, 111Elster, Jon, 6Elshtain, Jean Bethke, 8endurance, 178n13

Index 243

epoch, 12, 14,40,42,99, 103, 107, 122Equipo Argentino de Antropologfa

Forense, 35. See also forensicarcheology & anthropology

Eschatology, 2, 95, 101Escuela Superior de Mecanica de la

Armada, 30, 36, 38ESMA. See Escuela Superior de

Mecanica de la Armadaeternity, 13, 14,40,99,104-105,106,

145,168; desir d'eternite, 108;eternal objects, 120-122; retreatof the eternal, 106

ethics, temporal orientation of, 1, 6,168, 173-174. See also history,ethics of; mourning, ethics of;spectrality, and ethics

Evans, Richard, 131exhumation, 27, 79, 187n81; rejection

of, 33-35, 38exorcism, 60, 88, 112, 132, 133, 134,

144; language of, 87. See alsohistory, as exorcism

expectation, horizon of (Erwartungshorizont), 100-101,109

experience, space of (Erfahrungsraum),100-101,109

FFabian, Johannes, 16; 129-130facism,123Febvre, Lucien, 114fidelity, language of, 87Final Document on the War Against

Subversion and Terrorism(Argentina), 26, 40-41

Firmenich, Mario Eduardo, 29forensic archeology & anthropology, 35forgetting, 1, 8, 9, 11, 12, 15,28,

37-38,44,45,47-48,48,54,56,60,67,78,79,80,82,99,144, 158, 174; advocates of,8-9; collective, 11, 12; policyof, 7, 9; social, 80-81, 87;state imposed, 48, 88; struggleagainst, 33, 47, 48,15

forgiveness, 1, 3, 7, 8, 37, 48, 49, 53,54,55,56,58,67,73,77,78,79,84; drama of, 8; no futurewithout, 60;simili, 12;

Foucault, Michel, 98Freud, Sigmund, 42,132,141,148

151,153,155-156,158

244 Index

Fritsch, Matthias, 86Fritzsche, Peter, 103Fukuyama, Francis, 132funeral, 35, 86, 151, 158; rites, 37,

152, 214n46; temporary, 151.See also burial

future, ix, 1, 3, 7, 8, 11, 12, 13, 16, 18,26,28,40,41,42,44,45,47,52,56,56,57,60,63,75,76,77,84,85,86,95,99,102,105,119,134,136,137,139,141,142,143,154,164,165,175; asa value concept, 3; opening upof, 100-101; otherness of, 101

GGadamer, Hans-Georg, 107Galeano, Eduardo, 23Galtieri, Leopoldo, 28Garton Ash, Timothy, 9Gennep, Arnold van, 151, 152-153Ghosts, 13, 60, 87, 88, 133-135, 142;

desaparecidos as, 24, 25, 32, 36,37, 39-40, 45. See also specters;past, ghosts of

Gibbon, Edward, 97, 98Gide, Andre, 143God, 81,105,106,114Graffigna, Omar, 28grammatology,137graves: 34, 35 anonymous, 25, 27, 41;

mass, 79; secret, 34; symbolic,33,35, 159. See also, burial

Greenblatt, Stephen, 96grief, 23, 24, 34, 73, 154, 183n8Grunebaum-Ralph, Heidi, 49, 59

HHabermas, Jiirgen, 14, 15, 18, 99,Halbwachs, Maurice, 14Hamlet, 135, 143, 164, 165Harris, Verne, 48hauntology. See spectrality, theory ofHayner, Priscilla, 70Hegel, Georg, Wilhelm Friedrich, 95,

119,125-126,128,140,162Hegelianism, 95, 122, 125, 126, 127,

129Heidegger, Martin, 136, 139,140,143,

144, 145Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 96Herodotus, 96Hertz, Robert, 151-152, 153hindsight, 5

histoire evenementielle, 112, 115, 127.See also history, as endless succession of events

historia magistra vitae, 101, 103historians, ix, x, 2, 5, 11, 12, 17, 18,

19,48,55,59,62,74,83,85,92,94,95,100,103,107,110,112, 113, 115, 116, 117, 118,126,128,131,147,165,170,173

historical consciousness, 14, 18,60, 83,100,104,107

historical debt, 19,42,59,84,135historical (dis)continuity, 13, 14,44,

58,59,81,83,84,99,103,105,145,164. See also historicity,discontinuous; time, continuous

historical explanation, 115historical thinking (modern Western),

18,19,92,93,104,108,110,122, 147, 170

historical responsibility, 59,88historical revisionism, 11, 107historicism, 18, 92, 95-98, as anti-

Enlightenment movement, 96; asbelief in historical laws, 95; asprotestant Christian eschatology,95; as worldview, 96-98; classical, 98; crisis of, 96; German,96; new, 95

historicity: 14, 16, 18, 100, 133, 144,145, 148, 155, 156, 165, 166;discontinuous, 58; of natureand things, 119; pseudo, 119;regimes of (regimes d'historicite),12,13,14,19,103,173; structures of, 127

Historikerstreit, 147historiography, 14,27,47,54,96,98,

103,107,111,114,115,147,148, 170; academic/professional,ix, x, 5, 14, 18,92,100, 102,110,111,122,131,170,172;and fiction, 172; Enlightenment,97,98; post-holocaust, 147;therapeutic, 62. See also history

history: and justice/jurisdiction, 1,2,11, 168; as cemetery, 48, as collective singular, 102; as discourseof hegemonic power, 43; asendless succession of events, 93;as exorcism, 67; as therapy, 62;burden of, 9, 13; contemporary,5, 118; discourse of, x, 11, 16,

80,86,99,165,168,169;endof, 132, 133, 144; Enlightenment view of, 97; ethics of, ix,1, 2, 83; materialist conceptionof, 122; metaphysics of, 131;method of, 55, 102; obsessionwith, 1; philosophy/philosophersof, x, 19,43,104,116,119,122, 147, 165, 172; plurality offpolyrhythmic nature of, 123;religious visions of, 104. See alsohistoriography; justice, historical; specters, of history; time, ofhistory

Hobsbawm, Eric, 43Horkheimer, Max, 2, 6human rights: activists and organiza

tions, 7, 26, 27, 29,31,32,33-34,35,36,37,39,53,70,71; protection and promotion,26,28,29,32,43,57,70,74,80

Human Rights Watch, 29Humper, Joseph, 67, 77, 78, 79, 82Hunt, Lynn, 103, 107Husserl, Edmund, 136, 137, 138, 139,

141Huyse, Luc, 10

Iidealism (philosophical), 121, 125,

158-159Iggers, Georg, 95Ignatieff, Michael, 13immortality, 23, 121impunity, 29,33,38,39,43,45,46,

61,65, 73, 74, 75,80,86, 168,169

injustice, historical. See justice,historical

innovation, 12, 85, 100, 101. See alsonovelty

irreversible. See past, irreversible; time,irreversible

irrevocable. See past, irrevocable; time,irrevocable

Isaac, 106

JJameson, Frederic, 142Jankelevitch, Vladimir, 4,5-6, 12, 13,

14Jay, Martin, 128Joinet, Louis, 10

Index 245

junta trial, 17,27-28,29,45justice: administrative, 11; as calculable

equality, 144; as recognition, 10;constitutional, 11; corrective, 8;criminal, 7, 11, 12, 47, 66, 71,73, 168; historical, ix, 1-2, 3, 7,11,12,13,46, SO, 54, 57-58,61,63,144,168,174-175;intergenerational, 135; promiseof, 144; reparatory/restorative,11,47,48,53,66,73,75;retributive, 2, 9, 26, 75; retrospective, 8, 9; social, 7; spiritual,80. See also remembrance, asform of justice; time, of jurisdiction/justice; transitional justice

KKabbah, Ahmad Tejan, 69, 70, 73Kant, Immanuel, 144Kelsall, Tim, 67Khulumani Victim Support Group, 17,

46,49,60-64,65,169King, Preston, 84-85Kirchner, Nesror, 29, 30, 38Klerk, Frederik Willem de, 8, 51, 52,

59,86Koselleck, Reinhart, 14, 18, 100-102,

103, 108Kundera, Milan, 47, 48

LLabrousse, Ernest, 128LaCapra, Dominick, 147, 211n6Laclau, Ernesto, 174Lambruschini, Armando, 27Lami Dozo, Basilio, 28Lange, Johnny de, 46Langer, Lawrence, 14Levinas, Emmanuel, 3, 144, 163Levi, Primo, 14libations, pouring of, 80liminality, 153, 156,Lorenz, Chris, 5Lowith, Karl, 104loss, 18 39,42,63,148,149-150,153,

154, 156, 172, 173, 211n6; collective, 150; historical, 103, 172

Lukacs, Georg, 123Lundmark, Lennart, 116Lyotard, Jean-Franc;:ois, 95

MMaada Bio, Julius, 68

246 Index

Madres de Plaza de Mayo, 17,23-24,25,29,30-38,39,40,42-45,49,62,65,87,147,157,167,169, 173; popular university, 43

Madres de Plaza de Mayo-Linea Fun-dadora,32,187n81

Malamud-Goti, Jaime, 26Maier, Charles, 54Man, Paul de, 18, 78,99,162Mandela, Nelson, 49, 51, 54, 64Mannheim, Karl, 18, 96, 97,107Margolis, Joseph, 98Mad, Enrique, 45Marx, Karl, 43,125,128, 131,132,

133-134,144,145Marxism, 95,111,122,123,125,126,

127, 128, 132,133,135, 170Marin, Louis, 161, 214n46Massera, Emilio Eduardo, 27Mbeki, Thabo, 61melancholia, 12, 149-150memory: 8, 14, 15, 32, 33,41,47,48,

49,53,54,81,83,87,100,128, 131, 155, 156, 157, 158,159-164,165-166,171,172;alternative practices of, 81; and(proper) names, 163; bereaved,159,163; collective, 14,48;divided, 10; European cultureof, 80; deflation of, 12; entrepreneurs of, 14; fertile, 34, 37-38;interiorizing, 162; Jewish, 14;of death, 34; of horror, 44; ofoffence, 14, 64, 87; of the present/future, 164-165; politicsof, 44, 62, 144; post-holocaust,14; primary and secondary,138, 139; sacralization of,174; sting of, 55; surfeit of, 15,54, 169, 174; traumatic, 14,Western culture of, 80. See alsoremembrance

Mendez, Juan, 7Menem, Carlos, 28,30,36,37,38,

41-42messianism, 1, 133Mignone, Emilio, 39modernity, 1, 12, 13, 14, 15,91,99,

100,104,106,; fragile, 15, 169;legitimacy of, 102; secularity of,104; will to, 67, 78

modernization discourse, 88Moffat, Alfredo, 44

moment, 1, 85, 93, 99, 126, 142, 160,164,16S

Montag, Warren, 143mourning, 19,24,37,42,76,131,

147-167; and historicity, 147,lS5; and the self, lS0, 161;anticipated, 160-161, 163;collective, 147, lS0; Derrida'saccount of, 158-167; dis- oranachrony of (see time; ofmourning); ethics of, 148, lS7,lS9; healthy, 154; labor of (seework of); modern, 19, 148-1S1,lS3,lSS-156,157, 158,159,162, 165; non-modern, 19,148,151-154,156, 157, lS8,165, 167; refusal to mourn, 24,lS7, 167; task of (see work of);time of (see time: of mourning);universal need for, 39; without abody, 24, 139; work of, 42, 4S,131,132, 147,148,149,lS0,lS2, lS6, 157, 164, 166

Mueggler, Erik, 88

NNachtraglichkeit, 141, 142, lSSNandy, Ashis, 108National Directorate of Public Prosecu-

tions (South Africa), 61national time-line (South Africa), S8National Vision for Sierra Leone, 77-78nation building, 7, 8, 16, 53, S4, 60,

62,67, 78, 84, 86negationism, 11Negt, Oskar, 122neo-liberalism, 132, 133Newton, Isaac, 93-94, 107, 173Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1,6,96, 175nil novum sub sole. See novelty, histori

cal (disbelief in)Nino, Carlos Santiago, 9, 26Non-contemporaneity. See

contemporaneityNon-simultaneity. See simultaneityNora, Pierre, 14Norman, Sam Hinga, 72novelty, 12, 85, 98-99, 101, 103, 109,

113, 169; belief in, 99; disbeliefin, 101. See also innovation

Now, 82, 84, 9S, 120, 124, 125, 139,140-141,142,143; point-like,8S, 136, 138; self-identical, 140

nunca mas: report, 34,43,44; slogan,38,41, 4S, 84

Nuremberg trials, 6, 8, 52

oOblivion. See forgettingOkelo, Francis, 70ontological commitments, 19, 172ontology, 106, 108, 134, 135, 136,

139,143,172,174; archaic,111; political, 129; substantialist, 97; traditional, 139. See alsopast, ontology of

overdetermination, 126, 128

ppardon, 9,28,29,30,45. See also

amnesty; forgivenessParmenides, 139past: appeasement of, 12, 80, 82, 154;

as absent or distant, 1, 3, 4, 5,12, 15, 16, 19,39,55,58,62,65,87, 110, 112, 116, 118,121, 155,168,169,171,172,173, 175; as another country,59, as dead, 5, 45, 110, 119,120, 144, 166; as demanding,2; as passe, 103; divisive, 16,18, 54, ghosts of, 13, 56, 60,87, 169; haunting (see irrevocable); irrevocable, x, 3, 5,13,18,19,46,56,63-64,67,76,81, 84, 86, 87, 92, 103, 104,108,109,114,116,118,119,121, 122, 125, 127, 128, 131,146,147,155,156,157,165,166,169,170,171,172-175;mode of being of, 172; ontologyof, x, 1,4, 12, 174; persistenceof (see irrevocable); presence of(see irrevocable); strangenessof, 101-102, 103; spectral (seeirrevocable); survival of (seeirrevocable)

pastness, 57, 173path dependence, 5, 178n18peace treaties, 9, 84; Abidjan Peace

Accord, 66, 69, 75, 82; LomePeace Accord, 66, 69-70, 71, 74

perdurance, 178n13Pereyra, Liliana, 35performativity, x, 15, 17, 19,56,57,

63,64,65,67,82,147,148,

Index 247

166, 169, 170; external vs. internal,156-157

periodization, 58, 59, 85; politics of,102

persistence, 178n13. See also past,irrevocable

Petavius, Domenicus, 93phantoms. See spectersPhilips, Mark Salber, 15phonocentrism, 137physics, relativistic, 111Pinochet, Augusto, 8,25,86Plato, 93, 105,106Pope, 39Popper, Karl, 95Post-humous honoring, 33, 36presence, 1, 4, 13, 87, 134, 135, 136,

137,138,139-140,142,143,144,145,171,172,173,174;metaphysics of, 136, 14.5, 171,175; without agency, 14. Seealso past, irrevocable

present: contemporaneous, 60, 84, 111;eternal, 13, 14; extended, 85;historical, 126, 172; instantaneous, 16, 85; living, 12,45,110,111,135,142,143,161,163,173,175; mode of being,172; neoteric, 85; non-contemporaneity with itself, 111, 131;ontological status, x; presenceof, 171, 172; synchronic, 140,171, 172; unfolding, 85; uniqueness of, 58

progress, 8, 12, 18,44,50,60, 76, 78,84,101,109,144; belief in, 109;failure of, 77; idea of, 14, 100,102; ideology of, 123; longingfor, 77,78, spiritual, 92

Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act (South Africa),46,53,55

psyche: 150, 155, 156, 157, 159. Seealso self; soul

psychoanalysis, 135, 147, 149,158punishment, 2,9,29,33,37,54, 144,

168Pythagoras, 120

RRabinbach, Anson, 123Ranke, Leopold von, 96recollection. See remembrance

248 Index

reconciliation, 3, 7, 8, 10, 11, 16,28,38,41,42,46,47,48,52,53,54,55,57,60,62,64,67,73,74,75,78,79,80,84,88

redress. See reparationreeneactment, 116-122regime d'historicite. See historicity,

regimes ofrelativism, ethical and political, 135relativity, theories of, 93, 111remembrance: ix, 10, 16, 32, 34, 37,

43,44,47,48-49,56,63,67,79,81,82,84,119,138,144,151, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163,174; as form of justice, 55; asmoral practice, 87; divisive, 12;duty to remember, 2, 11; healingcapacities, 78; historical, 45;proper and improper, 49; overspill of, 12; redemptive, 79, 80;ritual practices as, 87; verbal, 81

reparation: ix, 1,26,50,53,57,61,63,64,144, 168; claims, 13;collective/community, 61,62;economic (see monetary/material); fever for, 76; individual,61; monetary/material, 33, 38,61, 62, 63; political, 38; politicsof, 13, 77. See also justice,reparatory

restitution. See reparationretribution, 1, 2. See also justice,

retributiverevenant. See spectersrevenge, 57, 88revolution, 32, 33, 82, 84, 103, 107,

124, 126, 128, 129; Cultural,88; French, 101, 103, negotiated 7; 49, 50, 54; revolutionaryinheritance, 133-134; Russian,122

Revolutionary United Front, 66, 68, 69,70, 77

Richter, Gerhard, 162Ricoeur, Paul, 115, 172right to truth. See truthRoberts, David, 98Robertson, Geoffrey, 72-73Rorty, Richard, 98, 107Rosas, Juan Manuel de, 41Rotenstreich, Nathan, 98Rousso, Henry, 2, 5, 83RUE See Revolutionary United FrontRiisen,Jorn, 109, 147, 155

sSabato, Ernesto, 27, 34Sachs, Albie, 54Sankoh, Foday, 69Santayana, George, 8,47Saussure, Ferdinand de, 136Schabas, William, 72, 76Scilingo, Adolfo, 29Seth, Sanjay, 108Shaw, Rosalind, 80-81, 87secularlsecularization, 18, 92, 104-106,

107,108,110,170secularization debate, 104self, 136, 138, 141, 150, 154, 160, 161,

162; splitting of, 150sentence (juridic), 2, 9, 27. See also

punishmentsign/signification, 136, 137Simmel, Georg, 91Simultaneity, 13, 16, 84, 106, 141;

absolute, 106; along-time, 16;civic, 84; cross-time, 16; global,107; national, 16; project of,16, 60, 64, 87. See also contemporaneity; synchronicity; time,simultaneous

slave trade, trans-Atlantic, 13, 87, 88,Slovo, Joe, 52SLTRC. See truth commissions (Sierra

Leonean Truth and Reconciliation Commission)

Snow, Clyde, 35Sophocles,37soul (of the dead), 151-152, 153, 162South African Apartheid Museum, 59sovereignty: of modernity, 102, of the

individual, 154Soyinka, Wole, 13,55,56Special Court for Sierra Leone, 17,66,

70, 71-75Specters: 40, 88, 132-136,142,143,

144,145,158,165,174; of history, 13; of Marx, 132-136

spectrality, 24, 32, 36, 38,39,40,41,45,65,87,88,108, 111, 131,133, 134, 135, 140, 142, 143,145, 146, 148, 157, 158, 164,165, 166, 169, 171, 173, 174.See also time, spectral

Spiegel, GabrieIIe, 14spirits (of the dead), 80, 87-88, 148,

157,165. See also soul (of thedead)

Stasi files. See archives

Strasser, Valentine, 68, 69Strassera, Julio, 27synchronicity/synchrony, 19, 94, 104,

107,110,116,126,127,135,136,137,138,139,140,144,171, 172. See also contemporaneity; simultaneity

TTaylor, Charles, 18; 104-106, 107, 108Teeger, Chana, 59Teitel, Ruti, 6, 11temporal acceleration, 103temporal clue, 139-140temporal continuum, 126temporal decay: 12temporal dislocation, 129temporal layers, 110, 116temporal location, 91, 110temporal logic, 43temporalization, of history, 101temporal orientation: backward, 3;

deviant, 84temporal order, 44temporal pointillism, 118temporal sequence, 85, 119temporal system, 91-92terrorism, state, 24, 25, 27, 30, 34, 36,

38,42testimony, 26, 27, 31, 53, 62,71, 78;

self-incriminating, 72Thompson, Edward, 43time: absolute, 18, 92, 93-94, 107,

108,109,146,170,173;abstraction of, 94; and thegift, 210n47; annulment of, 3;aporias of, 141; arrow of, 2;as medium of change, 14; asseries of modalized preents, 142;atomistic, 93; base, 128-130;biological, 3; calendar, 58, 167,167; Christian, 92; chronological, 84-86, 93, 99,105,167;circular, 44, 92, 201 n5; conflictand peace, 76; container, 116,130; continuous, 126, 128;cosmic, 111; differential (see plural); direction of, 12; durational,14; empty, 16, 18,92,107,108,110, 170; external, 116;geographical, 112; godlike, 106,115, 116; healing powers of, 13,40, 83; HegeIian, 126; hierarchies of, 87; higher, 104-105,

Index 249

108 (see also eternity); historical,ix, x, 2, 6, 12,15, 18,49,92,95,100,104,108,109,111,112-113,116,117,122,126,131, 164, 166, 171 (see alsoirreversible); homogeneous andinhomogeneous, 16, 18,92,95,107,108,110,126-127,170;ideological, 128-129; individual,112, 116; irreversible, 2, 3,4,5,6,12,16,18,19,24,39,49,55,57,62,63,65,67, 75, 76,81,82,83,84,86,87,88, 116,147,156,165,168,169,170,173; irrevocable, 4, 19, 64, 65,67,173; linear, 56, 92,118,140;lived, 105, 108; Marxist conception of, 123-126; mathematical,92,93, 115; modern consciousness of, 12, 13, 14, 15,60, 77,99-101,104,106,135; moralinversion of, 3; natural(ized),111, 130; of history, 2-3,4, 74,82,115,168,169,171 (see alsoirreversible); of jurisdiction, 2-3,4, 74, 75, 83, 168, 169, 170,171; of mourning, 164-165,166; of origins, 105; 164; of theworld, 115; out of joint, 135;politics of, 11, 15,24,44,49,56, 130,64,65, 82,83,129,166, 169, 174; popular experiences of, 95; (pre)Newtonian,93-94, 107, 173; primordial,140, 145; ordinary/profane,104-106; plurality of, 112-116,115, 126-130; presented andpresenting, 95; reference,128-130,173; relative, 93-94;reversible, 2, 3, 168, 170; secular, 104-106, 108; simultaneous,44; social, 112, 116; spatialized,118,130; spectral, 19,111;subjective, 93,108,138-139;substantive, 85-86; teleological,144

timefulness, 119Todorov, Tzvetan, 174tombs. See gravesTorpey, John, 13, 76Torti, Ana Maria, 35totality, Hegelian/Marxist notion of,

123,125-126trace, 143

250 Index

transience, 119transitional justice, x, 6-11, 12, 15,

17,18,26-30,33,48,49,50,52-53,61-64,66,67,70-71,73,77,83,84,85,86,87,169;dilemma, 7, 168, 173, 174, 175.See also justice

Trauma Centre for Survivors of Violenceand Torture (South Africa), 62

trauma, 14, 18,61,62,63,142,147,170

TRC. See truth commissions (Truth andReconciliation Commission ofSouth Africa)

Troeltsch, Ernst, 96truth: as absolute and unrenounceable

value, 10; as acknowledgement,10; as form of justice, 10; asmaking free, 56; forensic, 47;healing, 55; historical, ix, 47, 10,11,47,54,64,67, 169; moral,3; of the graveyards (verdad delos cementerios), 34; personal,55; restorative, 55; right to, 10,11, 39; social, 55

Truth and Reconciliation CommissionAct (Sierra Leone), 71

truth commissions, 9-10; ComisionNacional sobre la Desaparicionde Personas, 9, 27, 29,33, 34,35,38,43, 168; ethico-politicalagenda, 77; moral legitimationof, 10; Sierra Leonean Truth

and Reconciliation Commission,66-67, 71-82; Truth and Reconciliation Commission of SouthAfrica, 10,46-49,53-60

truth trials, 29, 36, 37Turetzky, Philip, 93Tutu, Desmond, 46, 47,55,59,60, 174

UUngleichzeitigkeit. See contemporaneityunidentified persons, 27, 41. Also see

desaparecidos

vVazques, rnes, 43-44vengeance, 13,46,57, 144. See also

retributionVico, Giambattista, 96Videla, Jorge Rafael, 25, 27,29Vinitzky-Seroussi, Vered, 59Viola, Roberto Eduardo, 23,27,29,40

WWeber, Max, 106Whitehead, Alfred North, 119, 120Wilcox, Donald, 93,107Williams, Bernard, 107Wilson, Richard, 58witchcraft, 87, 88Wood, David, 145-146

yYerushalmi, Yosef Hayim, 14, 144