Abstract
Milan Kundera writes somewhere: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”1 These are powerful words, words worth remembering in our time of rapid globalization—a time when, attracted by the lure of technocracy and technopolis, humankind seems ready to plunge into global historical amnesia. Kundera stresses memory or memory-work—not in order to foster nostalgia, but to retrieve resources of empowerment and social imagination, resources enabling humans, especially the oppressed and marginalized, to “struggle against power.” Kundera’s words find an echo in the work of Herbert Marcuse who, in Eros and Civilization, wrote that “the restoration of remembrance to its rights, as a vehicle of liberation, is one of the noblest tasks of thought.” As in the case of Kundera, remembrance for Marcuse was not equivalent to nostalgic escapism; partly under the influence of Freudian teachings he argued that, through memory-work, the “forbidden images and impulses of childhood begin to tell the truth that reason denies.” With specific reference to Marcel Proust he added that, in opposition to a narrow empiricism, “the orientation to the past tends toward an orientation to the future: the recherche du temps perdu becomes the vehicle of future liberation.”2
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Notes
Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (New York: Harper-Perennial, 1996).
Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (New York: Vintage Books, 1962), pp. 17–18, 212. Regarding memory-work, with a focus on Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Martin Heidegger, see my “Liberating Remembrance: Thoughts on Ethics, Politics and Recollection,” in Alternative Visions: Paths in the Global Village (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Little-field, 1998), pp. 145–165
compare also Myrian Sepulveda Santos, “Memory and Narrative in Social Theory: The Contributions of Jacques Derrida and Walter Benjamin,” Time and Society 10 (2001): 163–189.
Compare Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), pp. 133–137.
Marguerite Feitlowitz, A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. ix. One should add that the crimes of the junta went basically unpunished. Despite some trials and convictions in 1985, all ex-commanders were finally pardoned in 1990 “in time for Christmas” (p. x).
Jo Fischer, Mothers of the Disappeared (Boston: Sound End Press, 1989), pp. 12, 18, 25–26. As Fischer notes: “The families never got the condemnation they were expecting from the Catholic Church. The ecclesiastical hierarchy had never hidden its identification with the social and political vision of the Argentina military and its close relationship with the state remained untroubled by the events following the coup of 1976.… It remained silent even as its own members became victims of the proceso. During the later 1960’s and early 1970’s the traditional conservatism of the Argentine church had been challenged by the growth of progressive sectors within its ranks, such as the group of Third World priests who expressed concern about social justice and the worker priests who lived and worked amongst the poor. At least 30 of these priests and nuns, together with those individuals who dared to speak out against the kidnappings, disappeared in the months following the coup” (p. 23).
Marguerite Guzman Bouvard, Revolutionary Motherhood: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1994), p. 1.
Human Rights Watch/Americas, Colombia’s Killer Networks: The Military-Paramilitary Partnership and the United States (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1996). In its report, Human Rights Watch documented the “disturbing role” played by the United States in the Colombian military-paramilitary partnership (p. 3). To give a few examples: A U.S. Defense Department and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) team worked with Colombian military officers on the 1991 intelligence reorganization that “resulted in the creation of killer networks that identified and killed civilians suspected of supporting guerrillas” (pp. 3–4). More concretely still: “Massacres committed by just one of the units that received U.S. military aid, the Palace Battalion, took the lives of at least 120 people since 1990, killings that remain largely unpunished.”
ACAFADE, Desaparecidos en Centroamérica 1988 (San Jose, Costa Rica: ACAFADE, 1988).
Ramsey Clark, “Foreword,” in Bill Hutchinson, When the Dogs Ate Candles: A Time in El Salvador (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1998), p. xiv
William Dean Stanley, The Protection Racket (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996).
Marilyn Anderson and Jonathan Garlock, Granddaughters of Corn: Portraits of Guatemalan Women (Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 1988). The figures of the study were based mainly on facts supplied by Amnesty International, Americas Watch Committee, and the Human Rights Commission of the Organization of American States (OAS).
Compare also Greg Grandin, The Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000).
Anderson and Garlock, Granddaughters of Corn, p. 67. The book is replete with similarly gruesome stories. One further detail: “What does it mean,’ signs of torture?’ Cadavers are found without eyes, testicles, or with hands out off. Bodies are found without fingernails, teeth, or nipples. Women’s bodies appear with chests burned, brands from hot iron on their skin, and with their scalp pulled off Amputated parts are placed on top of bodies. Now you know what’ signs of torture’ implies” (p. 62). See also Susanne Jonas, The Battle for Guatemala (Boulder: Westview, 1991).
Compare, e.g., Richard Kearney, Poetics of Imagining: Modern and Postmodern (New York: Fordham University Press, 1998)
Drucilla Cornell, The Imaginary Domain (New York: Routledge, 1995)
Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blarney (Boston: MIT Press, 1987)
John Sallis, Force of Imagination: The Sense of the Elemental (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000).
Paul Ricoeur, “Imagination in Discourse and in Action,” in Gillian Robinson and John Rundell, eds., Rethinking Imagination: Culture and Creativity (London & New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 121–122
Compare also Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977). For a closer analysis of Kant’s theory of imagination see
Rudolf Makkreel, Imagination and Interpretation in Kant (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); also John Rundell, “Creativity and Judgment: Kant on Reason and Imagination,” in Robinson and Ruddell, Rethinking Imagination, pp. 87–117.
“Imagination in Discourse and in Action,” pp. 129–131. See also Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1936).
See Michael D. Barber, Ethical Hermeneutics: Rationalism in Enrique Dussels Philosophy of Liberation (New York: Fordham University Press, 1998), pp. ix–x. As Barber elaborates: “One who lives out the ethos of liberation locates herself in the ‘hermeneutic position’ of the oppressed and takes on their interests. … Beginning with the poor (desde el pobre), the hero of liberation thereby discovers a whole new critical perspective, a new criterion of philosophical and historical interpretation, a new fundamental hermeneutics, typical of the Gram-sic-type ‘organic intellectual’” (p. 69).
Enrique Dussel, Método para una filosofia de la liberación: Superación analectica de la dialéctica hegeliana, 3rd ed. (Guadalajara: Editorial Universidad de Guadalajara, 1991), pp. 185–186; for English translation see Barber, Ethical Hermeneutics, p. 27.
Dussel, The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of the “Other” and the Myth of Modernity, trans. Michael D. Barber (New York: Continuum, 1995), p. 12. Dussel is fully aware of the fact that the Other “covered over” in 1492 were not only the indigenous Americans but also the Muslims in Spain: “I write this preface in Seville as I edit the lectures. This was the land of the Moors, Muslims until that tragic January 6, 1492, when the Catholic kings occupied Granada, handed over by Boabdil, who was the last sultan to tread upon European soil” (p. 13).
Dussel, “Théologie de la ‘Péripherie’ et du ‘Centre’: Rencontre ou confrontation?” Concilium, vol. 191 (1984), p. 158; cited in Barber, Ethical Hermeneutics, p. 61. See also Dussel, The Invention of the Americas, p. 12; and Augusto Salazor Bondy Existe una filosofia de nuestra America? (Iztapalapa, Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1975).
For critical comments on Dussel’s work, inspired by such concerns, see, e.g., Ofelia Schutte, Cultural Identity and Social Liberation in Latin American Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), esp. pp. 186–190; also her “Origins and Tendencies of the Philosophy of Liberation in Latin American Thought: A Critique of Dussel’s Ethics,” The Philosophical Forum 22 (1991): 270–295. Some of these concerns are triggered by an occasional hypostatization of Levinasian “otherness.” In Barber’s balanced assessment: “Other-oppressive aspects of Dussel’s erotics, rightly criticized by Ofelia Schutte, may be traced to residual influences of his earlier natural-law position … or even to his uncritical assimilation of Totality and Infinity’s patriarchal erotics, which Levinas abandoned by the time he wrote Otherwise than Being.… Contrary to those critics who claim that he is a naïve populist, Dussel recognizes that ‘the people’ are not free from inauthentic-ity voices misgivings about popular religiosity, observes that the oppressed have often introjected the oppression they have received, and refrains from any uncritical endorsement of populist spontaneity.” See Ethical Hermeneutics, pp. 67, 73.
For a fuller account of her life-story see Elizabeth Burgos-Debray ed., I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, trans. Ann Wright (London: Verso, 1984). She has returned to Guatemala several times, but always had to leave due to continuing death threats. For some of the controversy surrounding her life-story see
David Stoll, Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999)
Elzbieta Sklodowska, “Author-(dys)function: Rereading I, Rigoberta Menchú,” in Benigno Trigo, ed., Foucault and Latin America: Appropriations and Deployments of Discursive Analysis (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 197–207.
Rigoberta Menchú, Crossing Borders, trans. Ann Wright (London: Verso, 1998), p. 221. As she adds: “I believe in the [indigenous] community as an alternative way forward, and not simply as a memory of the past.… It is something dynamic … not just nostalgia for eating tamales.… Identity passes through the community, it passes along pavements, it passes down veins, and it exists in thoughts.… Each day it provides the chance to be reborn, to flower again, to be rejuvenated. Identity is not studied in a dark room. It is like the nawaal, the shadow that accompanies you. It is the other, the one beside you” (pp. 223–226).
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© 2002 Fred R. Dallmayr
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Dallmayr, F. (2002). Memory and Social Imagination. In: Dialogue Among Civilizations. Culture and Religion in International Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-08738-6_7
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