MEMORY, HISTORIC INJUSTICE, AND RESPONSIBILITY - LW8ib. L04. HK. 04.6. 604% - W. James Booth
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LW8ib. L04. HK. 04.6. 604%
MEMORY, HISTORIC
INJUSTICE, AND
RESPONSIBILITY
W. James Booth
: Routledge
Taylor & Francis Group
UNIVERSITEIT GENT
NEW YORK AND LONDON
Faculteitsbibliotheek
Letteren en WijsbegeerteOo
First published 2020
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ISBN: 978-0-367-34221-0 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-34222-7 (pbk)
In loving and grateful memory of my parents, Bill and
ISBN: 978-0-429-32454-3 (ebk) Madeleine Marie-Jeanne Booth
Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Cover image: Wall mural of one of the disapp
eared of the Argentinian “dirty war.” Av. San
Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego, Argentina. Photo Martin,
graphed by the author,
MIX
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Printed in the Unite +
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by Henry Ling LimitCONTENTS
List of Figures
Acknowledgments xt
Introduction: An Archipelago of Absence
1 Justice Between Past and Present 40
2 Is the Past a Foreign Country? 68
3 Doing Justice to the Dead 97
4 Conclusion 140
IndexFIGURES ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ORONO
11. Derry rally. June 15, 2010 41 Earlier versions of parts of this study were presented at the: University of
3.1 Lucanian red-figure nestoris portraying Orestes, Clytaemestra, Virginia Political Theory Colloquium, American Philosophical Association
and the Furies 103 (Eastern division) Annual Meeting The Ensuring Justice Across Generations
Conference at Queen’s University, Belfast, Northern Ireland, the Historical
Justice and Memory Conference, Melbourne, and in papers delivered at the
University of Toronto, the UNC Institute for the Arts and Humanities, the
Berry Lecture at Vanderbilt, and the University of Texas-Austin. I am grate-
ful to the organizers and participants for their many critical questions and
suggestions.
oo
Warm thanks to my colleagues at Vanderbilt and elsewhere who commented
on the arguments set out in the following pages: Lawrie Balfour, Ronnie
‘ Beiner, Jeffrey Blustein, Marilyn Friedman, Marc Heatherington, Nadim
Khoury, Murad Idris, Emily Nacol, Mark Osiel, Lucius Outlaw, Jeff Spinner-
: Haley, Bob Talisse, and Janna Thompson.
|
: I am grateful to the late Edward Daly, formerly Bishop of Derry, and to the
i
late Leo Wilson of Belfast, both of whom helped me understand the Northern
Irish Troubles.
I owe a special debt to my Routledge editor, Natalja Mortensen, the Press’s
referees, and to Charlie Baker for their tremendously helpful advice and assistance.
My wife, Jane, and daughter Maddy have generously put up with years of
conversation about the topics of this book. Many thanks!
Revised material from two articles of mine appears in this study with per-
mission. They are “From This Far Place: On Justice and Absence.” American
Political Science Review, 105 (2011): 750-764 and “The Color of Memory: Read-
ing Race with Ralph Ellison.” Political Theory 36 (October 2008): 683-707.coe
:
INTRODUCTION
An Archipelago of Absence
rr
“In the Land of the Unseen"
TUS
In Sophocles’s Electra, Electra asks “How when the dead are in question can
it be honorable not to care?” Caring for the dead is one of the most basic of
human practices: for their bodies, their last wishes, and for remembrance of
Tm
them. This is a book about one of the ways in which we care for the dead: by
CU
doing them justice. Haunting all these practices, including bringing justice to
Oa SI
the dead, and making them perplexing, is what we might term a vernacular
form of naturalism: that what can be seen with our eyes, the world as an object
uf Un lo CU
of possible experience, tells us that the dead are radically absent, indeed nonex-
ORG Oe Hs
istent as persons, a mere “handful of dust.” They are, as Aeschylus writes, “in
the land of the unseen [amauron],” in relation to which we, the living, occupy
a very “far place.”? That absence itself can be understood in a number of ways:
Ge
as absolute, in the sense that the dead simply and utterly cease to have being,
ice
hence are no longer subjects, and cannot be parties to ongoing relationships
of any kind, whether political, familial or religious. In particular, there are no
Uo nS
relations of justice with them, for they are not persons and therefore cannot be
harmed or benefitted by our action or inaction in relation to their fates. “For
ys GSE
living creatures,” Aristotle writes, “living is being” and so dead people “do not
exist.”? Their physical remains, or grave sites, are their only presence among
e001
the things that exist, though strikingly we often hold those grave sites close
Ue et
to the communities of the living, tend their lawns and visit our dead there.*
te ee
Apart from that, the language of their presence seems to be situated somewhere
between fiction, imagination, and madness. At the other end of the interpreta-
eer a
tive spectrum, and especially among some faith traditions, there is the certainty
that death is not the end of existence but the beginning of a new life not here
rece lo
Se
ee2,
2 Introduction 2
Introduction 3
BO
in this world perhaps, yet in some other, whether known to us or (in Hamlet’s proof.”"' And again: “We are naturally disposed to notice things present, to
words) an “undiscovered country.”° hand, and before us. But it is not natural to retain a clear image of them when
Yet we do nevertheless care about the dead, including addressing previ- they have gone from our sight.” Autopsia, seeing with one’s own eyes, enjoyed
ously unanswered historical injustices that marred and, in some cases, ended a privileged position from the standpoint of knowing. Absence in this con-
their lives. In that way, we allow (as Axel Honneth argues) for a certain “dis- text means roughly not given in sensory experience. Hence the question: does
empowerment” of our everyday naturalism about the dead.° If the dead are absence of this kind mean unreal, non-being, as opposed to simply unknown/
characterized above all by a radical, if ambiguous, distance they are but one unseen?3
“undiscovered country” in an archipelago of the absent, the islands of which In the Phaedo, the fear that death extinguishes utterly the being of the soul
(like the dead themselves) seem, despite their non-presence, to be nevertheless and person, consigning them to the “land of the unseen,” and thus transforms
a part of our world. It is particularly fitting that justice has a certain kinship them into pure nothingness, is (partially) allayed by Socrates's response that
with the world of the absent, in its aspirational character towards future persons even the permanently absent and invisible have being and are not nullities. Not
and those living individuals rendered invisible, and in its efforts to break out of nullities: and not mere fictions, or confections wrought by the clever manipula-
a leaden positivism in order to find that “perspective of eternity.”” In practice, tion of words.'* Nor on this account is the reality of the dead something con-
it is reflected in the drive to give a response to the wronged, even (or so I shall jured up by a fevered mind. The recurring doubt in Hamlet as to whether the
argue) the wronged who are dead, if only that of discovering and proclaiming dead King’s presence is actual or merely a product of Hamlet’s madness does
the truth about past crimes and their victims. not trouble this Socratic account. And so he continues, arguing in detail for
In the Phaedo, Plato maps some of this archipelago, bringing together the the characteristics of the enduring soul. But for my purposes here the relevant
living, the dead, justice, and philosophy. His interest in this is certainly not one point lies in his defense of the reality of the absent. The invisible, what is not
with Electra’s. For her, the challenge emerges from a concern for the wronged experienced, is part of our world and so too therefore are the dead and the not-
dead understood as giving them justice. For Plato, on the other hand, it is the yet-born, past and future, what should have been or should in the future be.
status of the world as it is given to us through the senses and of those things And with that emerges the possibility of an idea of justice that breaks sharply
which are not present to the senses: “justice itself,” the dead and so on. So in with the constraints of naturalism, and allows for an extension of the boundar-
its central focus, doing justice to the dead, the present study does not intersect ies of political community, to include the denizens of lands unseen, the past
with the Platonic corpus. Nevertheless, as a guide to the “land of the unseen,” and future.
Plato is extraordinarily helpful in his observations on the place of absence in
our world. In the beginning pages of this section, then, I follow him briefly as
“Light to Compensate for Your Darkness”'>
he guides us through some of this archipelago.
Those who pursue philosophy, Socrates says, study nothing but dying and = The archipelago of absence and presence takes many forms. One is the Pla-
being dead. Of course, the dramatic setting (Socrates’s imminent execution) tonic account of absence and justice, where “justice itself,” is something that,
underscores and sharpens the relationship of death and philosophy. But the imme- DISCO Ie GIS ert though not visibly present, is nevertheless a real presence in actually existing
diate spur to their conversation is not so much Socrates’s own soon-to-occur cities. That unusual coupling of the absent but somehow with us can be seen
death. Rather, it is the fear that, according to Cebes, most humans have, namely, in Socrates’s description of the best city as a “pattern . . . in heaven.’”"® “Justice
that with death the person ceases to exist altogether and is reduced to the most itself” dwells in the “heavens,” and that far place separates it from the world of
radical absence, to nothingness.® Socrates’s direct response to this consists of an sight, flux, and the passage of time. Yet as a possibility, or perhaps only an
UES
argument that the soul survives death. But that assertion is embedded in a still aspirational North Star, its existence infuses the worldly city with a kind of
wider set of claims that bear on the arguments I shall advance in these pages. haunting presence, a reminder or trace of justice. | now turn to a related but
OR
To assert the reality of the dead against their apparent nullity (as the “unseen”’), quite different variant of this question of justice and absence. Justice and injus-
Socrates turns from the body to the soul? and to the thought that the soul tice are involved with absence and with a shadowing of the present not only in
eer
heen
endures without being embodied. The soul, unlike the body, is something invis- the Platonic idea of a timeless paradigm, but in a more earthly manner, as part
ible,!° not given to the senses and thus of uncertain reality for creatures for of the questions associated with addressing past injustice and its dead victims. The
nce
whom the real is first and foremost what can be perceived as present. In a surviv- never embodied form of “justice itself” of the Platonic account is here replaced
SS
ing fragment, Antiphon writes: “For men consider things which they see with by the once but no longer embodiedness of the dead. Plato’s focus on the being
aS GS
their eyes more credible than things which cannot be established by ocular and intelligibility of “justice itself” now yields to the problem of whether and
"ST
anne4 Introduction Introduction 5§
how we can do justice to those who seem irretrievably absent, to past victims In these ways, the obstinacy of the fact of the crime, the (here familial) obli-
of injustice.'” The phrase at the head of this section, from Aeschylus’s Libation- gation to remember it and the overlapping memory of justice (represented most
Bearers (‘a light to compensate for your darkness”), here functions as a bridge strikingly by the Furies of Aeschylus’s Eumenides), the past of death, the victim
between Socrates’s epistemic framing of the problem of absent justice and that and the injustice done her, do not entirely recede into the oblivion of absence
of Electra’s caring for the dead. Justice (Aeschylus suggests) involves bringing but remain rather a presence. This stands in marked contrast to the view of the
the light of recognition and acknowledgment to the darkness/invisibility that present “regarded as what is,” from which vantage point the past seems nothing
shrouds the dead victims of injustice, thereby making them in a way visible and more than non-presence, not-being, the “no longer now.” Classical tragedy
present, still subjects of justice and not “dust [or “earth,” ga] and nothing.””* represents this past as an integral part of our present, and that evoking it is not
To begin an exploration of this part of the archipelago of the absent, I turn to breathing the appearance of life into something that is no longer but rather dis-
classical Greek tragedy to encounter not an archaic view of the moral universe tancing ourselves from the standpoint of being-as-the-visible-present in order
but, on the contrary, one that, as Bernard Williams wrote, can help us better es better to grasp something the reality of which persists, if only in the shadows,
understand our own moral universe.” ee
obscurely, and out of sight.2® The recurrent motifs of blindness and forgetting,
Tragedy presents an effect of past time.”° It is therefore concerned with and the lack of transparency as to the origins of the protagonists’ fates*’ are ways
absence, for absence is the mark of the passing of time. There is thus an other- of emphasizing the weakness of the eyes and the limits of the visible, and in
ness, a distance, not that between perception and the fully intelligible, but one so doing to underscore the centrality and the enduring presence of the absent
opened up between the present and the past and their denizens, the living and invisible. Oedipus’s name designates both his injured feet (as silent witnesses
the dead.?! The dead seem to be the absent past par excellence, the purely past, to the enduring presence of his past) and a knowledge of the trajectory along
having neither a present nor a future.”? Classical tragedy questions this view which his fate will lead him.*°
of the absence associated with death and the past.” The absences of tragedy The tragic universe is the domain of night, of absence and obscurity. It is
are bound up with death and wrong-doing, in which both the dead and the Antigone’s cave, not Plato’s where false light creates a “day that is like night.”
ee
effects of past wrongs endure and color the present. But plainly it is not just Hers is a world of hidden fate, of intimations and traces of the past and of the
death that marks out the absences and shadows of the tragic vision. It is also the dead still among us, shadowing the present. The darkness of the imagery is
idea of a “distant origin,” an ancient, deep, and often forgotten and invisible closely bound up with the past of death and injustice, with their invisible pres-
fault extended across time and generations, one that lies at the source of aitia, ence in the fates of the living, and often with the protagonists’ ignorance of that
of guilt, debt, and responsibility, binding past to present, the absent to persons long duration. Electra’s “death-heavy” family home is the place of her misery.*?
here and now in a community of accountability. It is that original bloodshed or Her family is her fate; its past, her present. So likewise, Antigone tells her sis-
other fundamental violation of the just order of things that enables us to make ter Ismene that they are ill-fated daughters living under the curse carried in
sense of the unfolding of the characters’ fates.2* The enduringness of the crime their father’s blood, held by the “devouring immanence” (in George Steiner’s
SOEs
across time, sometimes expressed in the idea of the pollution (miasma) it causes, phrase) of their father.*? And in the Libation-Bearers (lines 1065ff), the Chorus
is one of the ways in which the past and absence haunt the present.” recounts the history of the family curse, bringing into view the weight of the
A second and related source of this presence of the past is the activity of past in their ill-starred home, thereby allowing us to make sense of Electra’s fate
memory, itself of two types: (1) the affective memory of family members across and that of her family members.**
generations. Here the underlying fact of a family marked by death and blood- The past in that sense lingers and casts its shadow on the present time, with
shed, often shown as invisible to some of the protagonists, gives rise to among the result that there is no pure now moment but always an extension into the
other things the struggle to remember. (2) Memory and justice: to forget the before, and into the to-come as well. That presence of the past is not something
dead seems dishonorable and unjust as Electra suggests in a passage quoted ear- confected, not a psychological event or phantasm, but is rather a real presence,
lier: “How when the dead are in question can it be honorable not to care for though one radically different from that of the living. When the Chorus in the
them?” Acts of memory acknowledge the enduring obligations among family Libation-Bearers asks Orestes what imaginings (doxai) are bothering him so, he
members and preserve those members from the uncaring nothingness of for- answers that they are not doxai at all but the manifestly present avenging hounds
getting, yielding what Michéle Simondon calls “memory-justice,””* that is, the of his mother Clytaemestra.*° The past lives in the present, rarely manifest or
memory of the crime and the demand for justice to be done, a demand some- saphos, typically there in an obscure but nevertheless real fashion. The world
times originating with family members themselves (Electra) and at other times of the shadowing of the present by the absent dead is to be distinguished from
proceeding from the Furies, both acting as agents of the unjustly dead. the confected presence of the rhetorician’s invoked past. That latter treatment6 Introduction Introduction 7
can be found, for example, in the classical funeral oration, with Pericles’s speech We can extend this to an understanding of miasma as staining not only the
at the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War being exemplary. There immediate perpetrators but their communities and descendants as well. This
we see, as Nicole Loraux argues, a dominance of the present and its cares,°6 extension raises the issue of blood-pollution, of guilt transmitted to other
EE
The past, the Athenian past, is created in speech, a phantasm and artifice made persons and across generations, in a way particularly foreign and striking to
to serve present needs. For Plato, the civic funeral oration was a thinly veiled modern ethical sensibilities, tutored as we are in a vernacular form of Kantian
kind of political sophistry, a worldly equivalent to the shadows cast on the cave morality in which the quality of the will, its intentionality, is central to defin-
walls in book seven of the Republic.5’ The absence and presence of the past as ing the moral character of the deed.#° Perhaps we can translate this notion of
TTT
a shadowing can be understood in the following ways: (1) central to the tragic transmitted defilement as saying that just as the perpetrator’s life is indelibly
cosmos, the real absence-presence of the dead and the injustices inflicted on marked by the blood-stain, even when he is (like Oedipus) not the intentional
them; (2) a view of shadowing as more psychological, the inner burden so to author of those acts, so those who share a community with him (his family, but
EE
speak of belonging to a community, whether a family or society (for example, also his city*’) are burdened with this past. This in no way makes them culpable
Hamlet or Macbeth); (3) the non-being of the past, together with its instru- in a strict sense, under the terms of the civic justice, but it does gesture towards
mentally confected (seeming) presence, the latter, as Plato saw belonging to the the thought that as members of communities across time, the past and the dead
IST
ambiguities of things not visible, such as the dead and “justice itself”: that they of that society are theirs too, enduring parts of their community, even in later
might be a real presence, an illusion or conversely a phantasm confected by generations. It is theirs not in the sense of the guilt of the actual perpetrators
EE
sophists. Hence their characteristically unstable status. but rather as a weight, stain, or shadow.* Antigone, Electra, and Orestes are
We noted the salience in tragedy of death and the passing of time. In the not guilty (are not the authors) of the fate that is part of being members of their
ESET
preceding pages, I have sketched in broad strokes some of what that means for households, but they are of that community and as such are stained by its past.
the concerns of this study. I now want to refine this account by drawing into As Habermas writes about enduring German responsibility for the Holocaust:
it notions of justice, responsibility and vengeance. Allow me to begin with it is because “these singular crimes” took place “out of the middle of our lives
the dimension of this that might seem the most remote to a modern ethical together” that post-war Germany remains accountable for them.’? This is col-
EES
imaginary: namely the idea of blood-guilt and the related but wider notion of lective responsibility, weaker than guilt but still going beyond the view that the
pollution.*8 The Greek word for moral pollution (miasma), carries the sense of only defilement we incur arises from what we as individuals have done. I will
defilement, of being stained or fouled.*? Thus Electra calls her father’s killer return to a further discussion of this later in these pages.
EEE
miastor, one who is fouled or polluted by the spilled blood of Agamemnon.” The idea of pollution testifies to an enduring moral community in which
The blood of the victim clings to and pollutes the hands of the murderer.” It is, responsibility extends over entire communities and across generations, one in
at this first level, a way of speaking of the indelibleness, the ineradicability of a which the living and the dead are not residents of temporally bounded and
crime and so of the permanent union of victim and perpetrator in the staining distinct societies but rather share a common moral world in an archipelago-like
of one with the other’s blood. And in being seen as polluted, it is closely related union of different but related generations. I turn now to another sense of pollu-
to shame, to being recognized as the befouled murderer in the eyes of others. tion or defilement, one that focuses less on what is shared than on the singular
Hence the need to hide the stain, to wash it out: “when we feel shame, we put position of the victim. This is the thought that pollution in the classical litera-
|
these out of the light—unfit for the sight of day.” ture is the “anger of the victim, or of avenging spirits acting on his behalf.”°°
“Out of the light”: there is a hiddenness about crime and the awareness The stain is here seen from the victim’s standpoint, as the indelible mark of
of it, a desire not to be seen, grounded no doubt in part in fear of the con- his blood union with the perpetrator, and of the imperative for that union to
sequences of exposure but also in the recognition of one’s own defilement. be addressed, either under the aegis of the law or of its wild kin, private ven-
Forgetting and blindness in these plays testify to the opaqueness of past crime, geance. We said that pollution in this sense tells us of the enduring character of
to its being there but out of sight.*? In some instances, the defilement is not the injury, a stain even when not visible. It also tells us of the persisting demand
initially visible even to the blood-stained character. “Where,” Oedipus asks, for justice to be done, a demand that is the voice of the victim’s righteous anger,
“shall the track (ichnos) of an ancient guilt . . . be found?”*4 As Oedipus himself calling for vengeance, for a just settling of accounts between the perpetrator
later recognizes, his innocence of intention and his ignorance do not free him and victim.
from guilt and defilement. Oedipus’s past is also his present: it casts a shadow, Not unlike the earth absorbing all visible traces of blood, so too are those
darkening his life even though the relevant parts of that past are not intentional unjustly dead, from the vantage point of a dominant present, “dust and noth-
actions.© ing.” They are as silent as their spilled blood is invisible. The idea of pollution,Introduction 9
Introduction
crime or says, is a wrong and she criticizes her brother, Orestes, for having “[forgotten]
ever, suggests that death and temporal distance do not erase the
their what he has learned.”*’ Of her sister, Chrysothemis, she says “It is terrible
moot the victim's need for justice. The shadows that: fall upon
and that you, the daughter of your father, forget him.”°4 To forget is to betray
rr : homes are signs, the traces of that present absence, of blood
Ocdipus asks (prodidomi) him (Sophocles, Electra, line 368), to unravel a relationship, in this
ment and of a persisting and unanswered injustice. When 7
example the relationship between a father and his child. The betrayal is two-
re shall the track of an ancient guilt be found?” we are meant, I think, to :
stand that he is blind to the crime. It is invisible to him but neverth
‘something real. The reality of unacknowledged and unanswered crimes is
testi-
eless
| fold: to forget one’s dead family members is to sever the bond between parents
and children, and so to be a traitor to the community woven of those bonds.
fied to by the Furies, who in their insistence on justice for the victims, are their It is also and relatedly to betray the demands of justice that are integral to that
agents, their ambassadors to the living. They make the victim visible, present community, here in relation to Agamemnon, this absent and silent victim.
to us. The Furies then resist the invisibility of the spilled blood and the inac- Children are the voice of a dead parent’s salvation, drawing them up from the
tion of justice, and in so doing they make present what is not available to sight depths of forgetting and absence.*> For the unjustly treated dead, the memory
OIES)
but exists nevertheless, and demand recognition of her. It requires the Furies, of those closest to them (partially) answers their cry for justice by preserv-
a Tiresets; or a king’s swollen ankles to bear witness,*! in order for the crimes ing their standing in the family community. It is an act of recognition. But
SONS BON ONO
to become visible, the victim’s cries for justice audible, and for the protagonists memory is also tied to revenge, which in this view completes justice: by kill-
themselves to be freed from blindness and forgetting. ing his mother, Orestes becomes the “champion [defender, advocate: arogos] of
SSCA
From tragedy, then, we receive both the aporia and possible responses regard- the dead.”>°
ing the. presence, the reality, of the dead as enduring subjects of justice. As we To be an advocate of dead men is to resist the process by which their absence
remarked, Sophocles’s Theban plays and Aeschylus’s Oresteia concern families transforms them into “dust and nothing,” and to do this by securing them as
across generations, murder, blood pollution, or miasma, what we might term still members of their community and thus as persisting subjects of justice, and
moral taint, and above all the passion to see justice done. Both cycles of plays not allowing their fates to go unanswered. It is in the first instance to “see”
dwell on the relationship between past and present in matters of justice. For that (horath) something not present to the eyes (Electra, line 113), to recognize those
reason memory too is central. Consider again this challenge posed by Electra, under the earth as claimants still on justice. The language of the dead, calling
daughter of the murdered Agamemnon: how can it be honorable, she asks out to their children from beneath the earth, beseeching them to remember and
act is, I would suggest, a way of saying that doing what is right by the exiled
not to care for the dead? . . . For if the dead man is to lie there as dust and victims of injustice belongs among our deepest duties in justice.°? When Anti-
nothingness . . . and they are not to pay the penalty, murdered in their gone says that she must “please those below’’® she means that in a related man-
turn, that would be the end of . . . the piety of all mortals. ner remembrance (to sustain a community of solidarity with them) and justice
are something owed to the dead. Those gods “who look upon those wrongfully
To care for the dead means among other things that justice here requires that done to death,” and “remembering [those] wrongs” must exact vengeance for
:
equivalence between perpetrator and victim be reestablished (antiphonos: “blood 2 them.*? But it is not only the gods who look upon them: so also do those who
for blood”). But they will not pay nor will the victim be recognized as a claim- | share a community with the dead, Electra and Orestes in relation to Agamem-
ant on justice if the dead are forgotten, rendered invisible, and thereby stripped /i
& non, and Antigone and Ismene in relation to Polynices.
of their standing as subjects of justice. Sophocles in this passage suggests that The Eriynes (“avengers of murder”) are the agents of laws that have life
2
the forgotten victims of injustice are, through forgetting, reduced to “dust and “not simply today and yesterday, but for ever.”®! The image of the Furies is
nothing.” I read this to say that their relationships with those in the present are one of tormenting creatures, all-seeing, pursuing those who have polluted
thereby severed, and not that their reality is, by our forgetting, extinguished.
For as Sophocles’s Chorus says later in the play (lines 1420-1), “the blood of the
| themselves with familial blood.©? They haunt the world of the living. Their
exacting of justice’s full due is not, to say the least, presented as if it was unam-
ee
killers flows in turn, drained by those who perished long ago.” Central then biguously good. The Furies’ effect in the world is in part an insertion into the
to bringing justice to the dead is the maintaining of their relations of solidar- present of their unrelenting absorption in the past and its evils, Yet at the same
ity with those in the present, and the response of those latter to the injustices time they also have an austere purity: they are the voice of the dead, represent-
inflicted on the victims. To act in answer to past injustice and its victims is one ing them to the living, and their agents, hunting down those who have treated
way to preserve a community of the past and present, to recognize and make them unjustly and shed their blood. The adamantine pursuit of justice is above
present those who otherwise would be absent and silent. Forgetting, Electra all the refusal to allow that past to become a sealed well, the domain of “what10 Introduction Introduction 11
had been done,” a refusal that drives their efforts to bring it and its attendant the “scandal of their silence.”®” Doing justice is then not only the work of the
ills into the present and among the living. present, or future, but is oriented as well to an unacceptable absence and silence
The appeal to set aside as obsessional the pursuit of justice for the past sug- of past victims of injustice.
gests that the tragedians saw both the power of the claims articulated by Electra
and their costs across an array of other human goods and temporal registers. “[The] Guilt Will Have Ceased to Be Visible’’®?
This ambiguity is nicely picked out in one of that tradition’s recurring themes:
the radical enduringness, indeed the ineradicability, of the unjust deed. The I now proceed to a more detailed discussion of the locale in the archipelago of
“death-heavy” house of Agamemnon and Clytaemestra visits its evils on the absence and presence that is most central to this study: the relationship between
children; the long stain spreads.®? Oedipus’s crimes, though unwitting, never- justice, death, and absence. In particular, I want to look more closely at how
theless pollute his land and children: no generation frees itself from the taint of we might understand the claim that an absent past and its denizens nevertheless
injustice within its own community.®+ Crimes (or blood crimes) here are virtu- remain a presence, not of flesh and blood of course but as claimants on justice,
ally ineradicable: blood cannot be washed away, the killer’s flight never ceases.®© shadowing and shaping the here and now, and owed justice and recognition.
From the standpoint of justice to the past, untempered by other human goods, Absence, the traces of the past and bearing witness as a manner of representing
both the crime and the pursuit of just compensation for it endure regardless of them will be my principal concerns in this section. To help frame this, I first
the consequences. turn to Patrick Modiano’s Dora Bruder and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Both
Here are some initial observations on the principal lines of argument we have of these works make vivid how absence, the past, its injustices and the dead,
laid out in the preceding pages. We have suggested a sense in which we can and doing justice in the here and now are bound together. And they differ in
understand justice as being intimately related in a number of ways to the absent, many respects, the most important distinction here being that one chronicles
and especially in the vexing question about what justice and recognition are a relationship of solidarity between the dead and the living, whereas the other
owed to past persons. Though absent, the dead are not merely “dust and nothing” depicts the rejection of just those relations across time and the resulting struggle
but are rather bound to us in the present by the ties of our various associations to recognize them.” Both therefore, in their different ways, address relations
(political, familial, and so on) and the justice embedded in (or constituting) between the living and the dead, silence and non-recognition, and solidarity.
those ties. By this path, we come to share a world with them. The world of Allow me to begin with Dora Bruder, an account of a young girl and the
justice in other words is not composed only of the present and tangible but person who bears witness to her life and death. In 1941, Dora Bruder was a
of the absent and invisible as well, the past, which, though done and gone fifteen year old Parisian teenager, the child of working-class Jewish emigres
nevertheless remains with us in traces, in the witness’s voice or simply in the from Vienna and Budapest. In December of that year, she ran away from her
scandal we sense in their silence. In that latter regard, justice is engaged in a boarding school. Eight months later, she was detained by French authorities and
kind of resistance to the corrosive effects of the passage of time,” a resistance to sent to the internment camp at Drancy. A short time after that, Dora Bruder
abandoning the past and its wronged victims to the sealed well of absence and was deported to Auschwitz where she was murdered.”! Her parents were to
silence. Later on, we will consider some contemporary parallels, but for the meet the same end. They and their fate might have simply vanished had not
moment suffice it to remark that the Furies, Electra, Antigone, and others do the traces of their presence found someone to be their witness. Some forty six
this work in their capacity as voices of justice for the dead, and as their repre- years later, the French writer, Patrick Modiano, was browsing through old
sentatives to the living. issues of Paris-Soir and in the December 31, 1941, number he chanced upon this
In the study that follows, I will argue that doing justice is in an important announcement seeking information about a runaway: “Looking for a young
part an effort to deal with absence: that of the past and of the future as well. In girl, Dora Bruder, 15 years old, oval face, brown-gray eyes... . Send any infor-
its retrospective exercise, it struggles to save the past from its sealed pastness, mation to Mr. and Mrs. Bruder, 41 boulevard Ornano, Paris.””
and the dead from the anonymity and silence of the grave. It strives, in other The announcement itself signaled an absence, which eventually motivated a
words, to abolish (in a limited way) the past’s/death’s absence, to give its victims search, one first initiated by her parent’s newspaper notice and taken up decades
a represented presence in justice, and to offer them the recognition and response later in Modiano’s book. Dora Bruder: the name of the lost girl and the effort to
in justice that is their due. This is the enduringness with which it is primarily discover her fate.’> Modiano set out to learn what had become of this teenager
engaged: the persistence of unaddressed injustice, and of its victims, and of the and her parents. That search was to take him to locales that were part of both
need to provide an answer to them. That enduringness is shaped by the condi- Bruder’s and Modiano’s lives: their neighborhood in Paris, to the no longer
tion of absence, the powerlessness of the dead, and of justice unanswered, of standing boarding school she attended, and ultimately to the police archives.”12 Introduction Introduction 13
In all these spaces, he writes, there was a sense of a palpable absence, of some- reconstruction can sometimes fill in these gaps, but in so doing they bring
one missing, an impression sharpened by the traces she left, even those now memory and imagination into close proximity and thereby raise the possibility
almost entirely effaced.”> In the police archives, Modiano found documen- that haunts our relationship to the past and its dead: that this relationship-in-
tary evidence of the family’s path to Auschwitz, and also hundreds of letters [ absence is closer to literary imagination than it is to relations between actual
from other families seeking the release of, or information on, their relatives in subjects.’”? (4) Answering the call to represent the dead victim of injustice has
7
French internment camps. None of these inquiries had been answered by the at its foundation a persisting relationship of moral obligation in the context
authorities. Modiano writes that it is we who were not even alive in that epoch i of an enduring community. (5) If in part Dora Bruder is to be found in the
|
who have become the “addressees” of these letters and their “guardians.””° It is memory traces of her particularity (documents, lived spaces, the marks on the
as if their authors have an unbroken tie with the present, one that binds us to e world left by her having been here), her presence is (as we suggested) located
them in relations of justice and obligation, an enduring connection of which in her standing as a member of the community, person and subject of justice
his book is itself one result. with a claim on that community, that it act as the guarantor and representative
Modiano’s account conveys in a particularly striking manner the thought of that part of what she is. That second facet does not individuate her but
that an absence is not a nullity, a mere emptiness, but is rather one of the ways rather describes one pole of an enduring, across-time relationship between us
in which past persons remain a presence: not a physical presence of course, nor | and the dead, a relationship that yields the demand for recognition and justice.
one of the manifold dimensions of who they were while still alive, but subjects | In different words, it describes what remains of the person even after death has
of justice and in that capacity still enmeshed in relations with us. Here are a reduced her particularity to the memories of those close to her and to a handful
few further observations. (1) The author himself becomes the addressee of Dora of material traces. And that, in Modiano’s account, is her status as a certain kind
Bruder’s parents’ 1941 appeal in Paris-Soir. He reads their request for help in of subject and enduring claimant.
finding their missing daughter, and dutifully answers it. Modiano could have We have discussed absence and invisibility in Dora Bruder as something embed-
chosen not to respond to their request, because they were distant strangers, ded in a normative framework persisting across time that binds not just the
or more radically and simply, dead and thus non-persons. Instead he becomes living among themselves but together the living, the dead and future persons.
the “guardian” of the dead, the preserver of their absent-presence, and their The silence and the invisibility of the dead seem to give rise to an obligation to
representative to the living. (2) Modiano’s task is, in part, to individuate Dora represent them and in so doing to make them in a way visible or present, and to
Bruder, to recognize her in the particularity that was her person, and that answer their demand for recognition of the injustice done them. Invisibility can
perished with her. At the same time, his book affirms her enduring reality as thus be a challenge to justice: what is unavailable to sight and direct experience
a subject of justice who suffered a gross wrong, and to do this in resistance to and what is not recognized as a person, the invisible, the disappeared, those lost
the solvent-like forces that threaten to overwhelm the presence of the dead to the “night and fog.’®° Domination and injustice can render the weak and
as claimants on justice. Beginning with her name as the title of the book, the vulnerable invisible as persons and subjects of justice,®! and they can ensure at
:
account of the physical traces in her neighborhood, her boarding school, and ::
least for a time that the dead are silent and invisible, denied our recognition of
the police archive documents: all are traces, visible signs of the invisible pres- them and their fate.
ence of a particular person, representations of a person being saved from the Sometimes these two kinds of invisibility, that of past persons and of unrec-
oblivion of death and forgetting. Dora Bruder’s murderers radically separated ognized living persons overlap, and are causally related. That layered approach
her from the world of the living but could not sever entirely the bonds of justice to absence and invisibility, past and present, can be found in Ralph Ellison’s
that keep her a claimant still. immensely rich study of persons not seen, Invisible Man.*? There the absent past
(3) In that limited sense, Dora Bruder is present: invisibly and then repre- and its dead and the invisible among the living, their relationship, and the
sented, to be sure, but not therefore a mere confection. Modiano’s language is importance of recognition to justice are central.
of enduring traces, signs of presence that were there before he became aware In the pages that follow, I am once more concerned with the relationship
of them or of her.”’ Her presence is independent of him: he is not her maker between justice, visibility, and invisibility, and in particular with the presence
but her “guardian,” meaning in part her ambassador to the here and now, and of past injustice in the here and now. Here I follow Ellison into the history
the “addressee” of her dead parents’ appeal for help. Yet Dora Bruder’s past- of race in America, embodied in the visibility/invisibility of color. The vis-
ness and distance is evident in manifold ways, beginning with the gaps in our ibility of color would seem to make it a daily and enduring reminder of the
knowledge of her. Temporal remoteness weakens our knowledge of persons, intertwined history and present actuality of racial injustice, and in this way to
and in those interstices are often concealed the secrets of the dead.”* Fictional be intimately a part of American memory and identity. Yet the tie between\
Introduction 15
14 Introduction
/
as I shall that it belongs to an enduring community with a past of injustice; a heritage,
memory and color is anything but certain or transparent. Rather,
red, for- /: binding past and present in relations of solidarity and obligation, with color
argue (with Ellison), it is a latticework composed of things remembe
but sometim es saved from obliv- as a reminder of that community, its past and present.®? It is also and crucially
gotten, glossed or idealized, things invisible
and by those who bear witness to a reminder of how forgetting can render all that invisible and unrecognized,
ion by the traces they leave in our world
together belong to the struggle over hiding past injustice and its victims from view, thereby injuring them again,
them. Finally, color, memory, and identity
and its unjustly while at the same time it shelters and sustains present injustice. Ellison’s work,
racial justice in America, a battle in part to recognize the past
and map his act of writing, dedicated to the place of memory and justice in American
treated. Ellison’s writings, and particularly his Invisible Man, explore of
life, turns to that community, to its past and present. Not only past and present,
these issues.®?
but past and future, those two locales on the archipelago of absence, are related
The Invisible Man begins with this epigraph, a passage from Herman Mel-
more and more in Ellison’s account. Asked if his work embodied a too rosy optimism, Ellison
ville’s Benito Cereno: “You are saved,’ cried Captain Delano, '
you?’”** responded that “hope and aspiration are indeed important aspects of the reality
astonished and pained: ‘you are saved: what has cast such a shadow upon
:
|
shadows. In Melville’ s story, Delano, an of Negro American history.”°? Hope and waiting, though, were always wed-
To be saved, alive yet still to be in the &
to forget the past, just (he ded to the fact that African American “consciousness . . . is a product of our
American, makes this remark urging Benito Cereno
answers memory” and not of “a will to historical forgetfulness.”°! American optimism,
says) as the sun, sea, and sky “have turned over new leaves.” Cereno
human.” To be on the other hand, emerges out of forgetting, a making invisible of its own past.
that the sea and sky “have no memory . . . because they are not
and looking Its sunny disposition is made possible by ignoring the shadows. Remembering
fully human is to dwell in the extension of time, bound to a past
The shadow here is cast by the past, on the other hand does not foreclose the future, though it may moderate our
forward to, anticipat ing, a possible future.®5
on his ship, or perhaps a memory optimism about its possibilities. What it also does is to recognize the standing
kept present in the memory of a slave revolt
opti- in justice of the past and in so doing to affirm that the horizon of just relations
of slavery as such. Delano’s appeal to turn away from the past expresses an
g.®® Ellison extends beyond those in the present, to persons past, and if to them who are
mism, and a future-directed gaze, made possible in part by forgettin
not denizens of the here and now then perhaps also to the future, to those yet
too wrote of shadows, and in particular “the shadow of [the] past.”8? His choice
nding of to be. Ellison’s writing embraces the three principal locales on the archipelago
of these lines from Melville suggests that central to Ellison's understa
the resulting of past, present and future.
justice in America is the presence of the past, the shadows it casts,
be saved:” “We don’t remember enough; we don’t allow ourselves to remember events,
temptation to forget, and the relationship of that to the future. “To
tion, the civil rights struggle, the and I suppose this helps us to continue our beliefin progress.””” Ellison answered
the Civil War, the Emancip ation Proclama
brought African America ns more this with a concern for the enduring presence of the African American past,
ending of legal segregation, and so on all had
same time, and for the place of memory in identity and in justice. Justice called for a deal-
fully into their country’s political and economic life. Yet, and at the
ing with the past but it also tempered that retrospective glance by binding it to
race and its history remain a powerful and often troubling presence, whether
in con- “hope and aspiration,” to what Ellison termed a “watchful waiting.” It is not
in the lingering and observable effects of past discriminatory policies,
over doing a window into a distant world but rather an insistence on the past’s continued
troversies over Confederate war memorials, and in ongoing debates
presence of presence, and on the crucial importance of acknowledging it. In the words of
justice to this past. That shadow is also the work of the haunting
weigh on T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets with which Ellison begins Juneteenth:
past injustices and their victims. The view that the past should not
the fact that those centuries of injustice,
the present must inevitably confront
—
not vanished but on the contrary This is the use of memory: For liberation. . . . From the future as well
incompletely (or not at all) answered, have
institut ionalize d forms of race as the past... . See, now they vanish, The faces and places, with the self
continue to stain America, however much the
Delano, some might wish which, as it could, loved them, To become renewed, transfigured, in
relations may have changed, and however much, like
to another pattern.”
to put the past “behind them.” This Melville passage tells us that the will
the past are
forget, the orientation to the future, and the insistent presence of
justice. One does not triumph over the other: the weight of the past is not lifted, but
central and sometimes conflicting moments of the long struggle for
the shadow it casts does not overwhelm the watchful waiting for the future.
“The act of writing,” Ellison said, “requires a constant plunging back into
Man, that Rather, memory and hope, past and future, race and American democratic life
the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.”®* In the Invisible
n are all to be seen there. Ellison thought that, in the end, the core American
maxim also guides the account of the particularity of the African America
the thought failing was a flight from the burdens of its own past, and from the manifold
experience. Plainly his understanding of that experience rests onintroduction 17
16 Introduction
For all of the inattention to, and fleeing from, the past that characterize
interactions of past and present, including rendering African Americans invis-
to much of American life, Ellison’s account suggests that the past and its denizens
ible. Exiling that past to a sealed well of absence was the flaw he wanted
: in all their manifoldness nevertheless endure, if only obscurely, or obliquely, in
bring into the light of day. <
and the shadows and around the corners of the most ordinary phenomena of our
America’s relationship to its own past is intermingled with forgetting
not innocent at all, but rather a making invisible of lives together. Indeed, implicit in the idea of a flight from the past, and of the
distortion, its innocence 2
‘ counter-struggle to bring it into the full light of day, is the acknowledgment
injustice.°* Amnesia, in brief, is related centrally for Ellison to the injustices of /L
that even with the “limited attention” accorded the past this does not mean
the American past and present. Z
that it and its denizens have simply vanished. The past and its people are there,
22
if subterraneanly, in the everydayness of American life; and the demand that
Perhaps more than any other people, Americans have been-locked in a
the injustices done them be recognized and answered awaits a representative
deadly struggle with time, with history. We've fled the past and trained '
to give them voice. That continued presence means that forgetting, and the
ourselves to suppress, if not forget, troublesome details of the national |
memory, and a great part of our optimism. . . has been bought at the
:: relief it promises from the burdens of the past, are always merely provisional,
and therefore vulnerable especially to an unwilled resurgence of the past into
cost of ignoring the processes through which we've arrived at any given
of our national existence.”
its midst, to (in Baldwin’s phrase) a “dangerous and reverberating silence,” and
moment
to the shadows cast by race on American life.® Were the past simply done and
gone (or if it could be made so), it would not be the troubling presence that it is.
This forgetting renders past injustices and their victims invisible. In so doing,
And so some seek a “compromise with truth in the past in order to make peace
we foreclose the possibility of recognizing them as persons who, treated with
per- in the present and guide policy in the future.””° Still, the presence of the past,
savage injustice, now stand as claimants, asking to be recognized for the
Their relationsh ip to those in the forgotten though it may be in the foreground of citizens’ lives and in their offi-
sons and subjects of justice they were/are.
across time are rejected, cial narratives, is an enduring reality. That “unwritten history,” that “obscure
present is thereby also altered: the ties of solidarity
they alter ego,” is “always active in the shaping of events . . . always with us.” There,
the threads binding them as members of the community loosed. And thus
are con- “in the underground of unwritten history, much of that which is ignored defies
cease to be subjects in an enduring community of justice but instead
our inattention by continuing to grow and have consequences.”'° The past,
signed to the oblivion of the forgotten.
though fragmented and dotted with forgetting and distortion, is nevertheless
The invisibility of the present tense narrator of the Invisible Man is bound
carried forward in its traces, color being central among them, always threaten-
up with this erasure of his community’s past. Color is that most visible sign of
are ing to intrude, Fury-like, upon and upset a self-understanding fashioned out of
past and present injustices, but stripped of its meaning, it and its bearers
men and women without charac- a mixture of amnesia and comforting narratives.
thereby rendered in a radical sense invisible,
that “The guilt will have ceased to be visible.”!°! That the past stands around the
teristics, community or identity. Such forgetting is itself an injustice, and
past victims of corner, invisible and absent, there in traces and echoes but not seen or recog-
for a number of reasons. As we have just suggested, it consigns 2g
a
nized for what it was and is, is itself a mark of the injustice of dispossession. We
i
injustice to their unanswered, unacknowledged, fates and in so doing it loos-
are familiar with this in Du Bois’s and Baldwin’s critiques of the writing and
ens our ties to them. The invisible past of injustice affects the present too. To
part
Q
teaching of American history. Ellison, because his focus is on the vernacular of
know who one is, or who we are in the plural and as a community, is in |
to know one’s past. The forgetfuln ess of American life, born of its scarred past |
:
color, does not portray dispossession in the higher registers of remembrance,
amnesia, civic history for example, but rather presents it in its everydayness. Like that
and its absorption in the present and future, and its intertwining of :
loss itself, his story is a kaleidoscope of fragments, the meaning and relatedness
partial remembrance and misplaced innocence, makes that past something out
cost of which seem to emerge almost haphazardly and without being willed, mir-
of sight. America has been “been reluctant,” Ellison writes, “to pay the
distor- roring the way he sees them as experienced. The varied facets of this disposses-
of its achievement” and hence the resulting injustice, forgetfulness and
sion are revealed in a swirl of discrete episodes, connected only by the narrator’s
tion.® Forgetfulness achieves a radical kind of dispossession, that of denying
voice and vantage point.!°? They are woven together inasmuch as they belong
recognition to a community and its members, past and present: to their stories,
to a black (and therefore, in America, invisible) man. Their unity in other words
names, history, to their standing as subjects of justice. It makes them invisible
is dispossession as an erasure of the past.
men and women. Thus, with that forgetting and innocence comes a flawed and
In our discussion of Modiano’s Dora Bruder, we remarked on the importance
distorted relationship to the community’s past and present: a non-recognition
of restoring names to those who disappeared into the night and fog of acts of
of their standing and of the claims of that community.”You can also read
