Memory Ireland: Volume 3: The Famine and the Troubles

1 The Indigent Sublime Specters of Irish Hunger

17 1 The Indigent Sublime Specters of Irish Hunger DAV I D L L OY D Haunting is a constituent element of modern social life. It is neither premodern superstition nor individual psychosis; it is a generalizable social phenomenon of great import. To study social life one must confront the ghostly aspects of it. —G OR D ON , Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination It is necessary to speak of the ghost, indeed to the ghost and with it, from the moment that no ethics, no politics, whether revolutionary or not, seems possible and thinkable and just that does not recognize in its principle the respect for those others who are no longer or for those others who are not yet there, presently living, whether they are already dead or not yet born. —DE R R I DA , Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International —Speak; I am bound to hear. —So art thou to revenge when thou shalt hear . . . —Remember thee! Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat in this distracted globe. Remember thee! —S H A K E S P E A R E , Hamlet 1. The problem is, surely, how to address redress with adequate justice. Redress assumes, not a saving intervention that might prevent acts of violence and expropriation in the present, but an address to the past from which we are 18 David Lloyd disjoined by the very history of which effective violence is a constitutive part. In relation to the violence of the past, we seem helpless, impotent to set right the injustice that has so forcefully shaped the very times that we inhabit. Suspended between the call to vengeance and the commitment to memory, redress is charged neither with the repetition of the cycles of violence that revenge seems bound to perform, nor to the issueless tribute of remembrance. It is burdened with the need to set right. But how is it possible to set right the violence of the past when what that violence took from its victims was not merely life, but a specific and unreproducible orientation toward the future? Every act of historical violence has sought to destroy less life itself than the unruly, hopeful imagination of a future in which that life is lived otherwise, athwart the direction violence imposes on history. Can redress then take place except in disjunction from the order of the present , which is no less than the future imposed on the dead by past violence? Mourning is no redress, if mourning the dead entails coming to terms with their loss, a loss not ours to justify, not ours to move on from, when our very capacity to move on is predicated on the progress that judged the dead dispensable . Commemoration too is unavailing insofar as it fixes the dead in the past where what the dead require is a place in the futures that were denied them. Only in remaining out of joint with the times to which the dead are lost is there any prospect of a redress that would not be concomitant with the desire to lay the dead to rest. For the restlessness of the dead stems from the lack of a future fit for them, and only the unfitting can address the ghosts that rise like vapors through the disjointed frame of the present. The paradox of redress is that the catastrophic violence of history can be righted only in relinquishing the desire to set it right, in order instead to make room for the specters in whose restlessness rhythms of another mode of living speak to us. The Irish Famine, which commenced in 1845 with a failure of the potato crop and recurred over large parts of the country until 1851, was the greatest demographic catastrophe in European history. At least one million people died of starvation and a further million left the country, commencing a trend of massive emigration that continued unabated until the end of the nineteenth century. The Famine was thus directly responsible for the disappearance of at least one-quarter of the population, estimated in the British census of 1841 at 8.1 million. As is well known, the vulnerability of the Irish Specters of Irish Hunger 19 population to such a subsistence crisis was occasioned by the very abundance of the potato, which was capable of remarkable reproduction on poor...