On the Difficulty of Living Together: Memory, Politics, and History

By Manuel Cruz

Manuel Cruz launches a nuanced study of memory and forgetting, defining their forms and uses, political meanings, and social and historical implications. Memory is not an intrinsically positive phenomenon, he argues, but an impressionable and malleable one, used to advance a variety of agendas. Cruz focuses on five memory models: that which is inherently valuable; that which legitimizes the present; that which supports retributive justice; that which is essential to mourning; and that which elicits renunciation or revelation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Apr 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9780231541398

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ON THE DIFFICULTY OF LIVING TOGETHER

New Directions in Critical Theory

NEW DIRECTIONS IN CRITICAL THEORY

AMY ALLEN, GENERAL EDITOR

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

For a complete list of books in the series, see Series List.

ON THE DIFFICULTY OF LIVING TOGETHER

MEMORY, POLITICS, AND HISTORY

Manuel Cruz

Translated by Richard Jacques

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS    NEW YORK

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

Publishers Since 1893

NEW YORK    CHICHESTER, WEST SUSSEX

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Copyright © 2016 Columbia University Press

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E-ISBN 978-0-231-54139-8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cruz, Manuel, 1951- author.

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

Manuel Cruz ; Translated by Richard Jacques.

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

Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2016. | Series: New directions in critical theory | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015039842 | ISBN 9780231164009 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231541398 (e-book)

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

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

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

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

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [e-mail].

Cover design: Faceout Studio

References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

CONTENTS

Preface to the English Edition

CHAPTER 1

Of Memory and Time

CHAPTER 2

The Present Breathes Through History

CHAPTER 3

For an Urgent Typology of Memory

CHAPTER 4

We Need to Start Defending Ourselves from the Past

CHAPTER 5

More About Traumas, Calamities, and Catastrophes

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

Notes

Index

PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION

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

That last expectation is legitimate. Above and beyond the quite different ways the same problems are posed in different realities, the persistence of certain concerns leads us to suspect that we are looking at constituent dimensions of what, using the title of one of Arendt’s greatest works, we might well call the human condition. Because the impulse that leads us to confront our past, to measure ourselves against it, to try to draw from the story of what has happened lessons that will help us to go on our way freed from the worst of ourselves is human, incorruptibly human. And hopeful of living together in a different way, as far as they will allow us.

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

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

Not a day goes by in newspapers, magazines, or the media in general without some reference to the issue of memory. A short while ago I read a newspaper interview with John Berger containing the following noteworthy phrase: We live under enormous pressure to forget, to select memories. In fact, the first thing that drew my attention was the comment by the interviewer that prompted it: "Your book seems to be an invitation to remember, now that memory seems to be flagging and another, poorer south is coming towards us" (my emphasis, M. C.).¹ I acknowledge that I was surprised by the casual way in which the statement was taken for granted. Is it actually true that memory is flagging?

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

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

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

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

Most of all, as we have already said, we must include the essentially political dimension in reflections about memory. Berger rightly referred to it in the same interview. He said: "We live in a culture which says that the market rules, that if you do not buy you do not count, that the poor are dispensable. If you live in a country that says that, and this is a new phenomenon, there is enormous pressure to forget things. The time when we were poor, for example" (my emphasis, M. C.).³ The point, therefore, is not to lapse for the umpteenth time into the sterile opposition between remembering and forgetting. Which is to say that if we were asked the question: So, do we remember too little or too much?, in my opinion we could only give one answer: we remember badly and, I would add, to correct that distortion of memory itself we should apply our most strenuous efforts.

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

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

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

Barcelona, 1 January 2010

CHAPTER ONE

Of Memory and Time

In the beginning was the body. At one end of the arc we find man as a species, at the other the self, the person, the social role, society now definitively stratified: the history of humanity is the history of that journey. In animal species the self only exists, at most, as sexual preening. What they have is a primitive sympathetic reaction, which sometimes occurs in man too, but only episodically. In animals, however, it is a way of being, a deep empathy through which an individual communicates with another member of his species, and maybe even with members of other species. It is a sympathetic communication, a monstrous solidarity that does not exist in man. Nevertheless, something of it lives on in him insofar as he is endowed with a body. But any return to that animality is banned by society, because it would mean a return to the disappearance of any self, as in certain animal species. Prohibition here is not equivalent to coercion (although there may have been confinement in some periods), but to socialization of a certain kind, which culminated in the invention of the self. The process is irreversible to a large extent, according to the quality of the entities that intervene. That means, therefore, that a proposition in terms of an alternative, self or madness (identified with animality), is, with a few exceptions, mistaken because it overlooks the existence and characteristics of the process. Madness is far more bad sociality than return to animality. Bad in a broad sense, which would come under Jean-Paul Sartre’s maxim that hell is other people. In any case, they can be. Or is there no ingredient of madness in that useless administration of the affections and intensities that go to make up the normal everyday life of the majority of people? Is that ingredient not the one that bursts out as soon as that everydayness is tensed? There is a good deal of unsatisfied identity about madness.

But it is not enough to point out that the ruin of identity is the core of insanity. With that alone we would seem to be insinuating that identity is something given (albeit historically), almost natural, whose social life always poses a threat. That idea corresponds to the clichéd view of childhood as the only age of fulfillment. But identity is not a gift from anybody; it is a