The Thought of Death and the Memory of War

Introduction. War and the Death Drive

Howeverwejudgethepastorthefuture,ourjudgmentwillbehaunted, marked by the seal of war in the twentieth century. The memory of war intervenes inescapably in the relations among states, whether bringing them together or driving them apart. It gives rise, year after year, at predetermined dates and in predetermined places, to appeals for forgiveness, symbolic gestures of reconciliation, just as, here and there, it is used to recall unpaid debts and persistent misapprehensions ,aswellasabsolutionsthatwaitenduringlyuponunutteredpleas for forgiveness. Our memory on occasion abides in some or other survival of prejudice, in the characterizations and caricatures of “peoples ” that are propagated in wartime. The memory of war, in the form of commemorations, punctuates our political calendar with its most “sacred” dates—November 11, June 6 and 18, and May 8 in France. On such dates the memory of war is essentially the memory of those whodiedinwar,therecollectionoflivessacrificed,etchedinthestone of “war memorials” and in the bronze of commemorative plaques— which governments, in the wake of conflicts, have always erected as reminders, as factors, or instruments of cohesion, and sometimes of “union sacrée” and mobilization. Finally, the memory of war is inflicted on us, over and over again, as an element of political discourse and action. Memory, by this very fact, informs the judgments we make of one another. Because memory can be insulted, wounded, 1 introduction War and the Death Drive  Sigmund Freud  outraged; because it lends itself to falsification, to denials and denegations ; because it is rendered fragile as much by the possibility of being forgotten as by that of being instrumentalized, memory becomes the object of ethical as well as political responsibility. The historian cannot adequately address this responsibility. One can neither do just anything with nor do nothing with memory; one can neither make just anything from nor nothing from memory. So why do we rememberwars?Whydoestheirremembranceoccupysomuchspace in the collective imaginary? Why are we dealing with something very different from historical knowledge, however necessary this might be? Because memory as responsibility is about our past, present, and future attitude toward death. Freudwouldsuggestasmuchina1915text,ZeitgemässesüberKrieg und Tod, or Reflections on War and Death, written when World War I had been raging for more than a year already, though (nearly all) the worst was still to come.1 Future decades would not controvert his reflections. As he endeavored to analyze why the evil was experienced “with excessive force” in war—and we know that, with the passage of time, that excess would not abate—Freud pointed to the convergenceoftwophenomena:thedisillusionmentthatwarinduced, and the change in our attitude toward death that war engendered. The one and the other shall serve as my point of departure.  What caused disillusionment? Like many who followed him, Freud explains that disillusionment was provoked by the incapacity of the belligerents’ common civilization—that great humanistic civilization that had given to the nations of Europe their titles of nobility—to efface or contain the transformation of the foreigner into the enemy. That incapacity was aggravated by the inability to slow the pace at which, from that point forward, another civilization—one characterized by hostility, hatred, and repulsion—asserted itself and prevailed 2 Introduction against the moral and political “restrictions” that were the legacy of humanism: It [war] places itself above all the restrictions pledged in times of peace, the so-called rights of nations, it does not acknowledge the prerogatives of the wounded and of the physicians, the distinction between peaceful and fighting members of the population, or the claims of private property. It hurls down in blind rage whatever bars its way, as though there were to be no future and no peace after it is over. It tears asunder all community bonds among the struggling peoples and threatens to leave a bitterness which will make impossible any re-establishment of these ties for a long time to come.2 Exposed to the disastrous impact of filtered news [information] and monitored communications (instruments of this other civilization), encouraged to approve if not to acclaim the violation of moral principles whose transgression they could not have imagined they would one day accept, nothing in their history, their traditions, art, literature, law, or medicine stopped those whom Freud calls “the participants in humanity’s highest civilization” from surrendering to “cruelty”— however one might define it. Cruelty, as we shall see below, is not unrelatedtothecomplexquestionof“changeintherelationtodeath.” The author of The Interpretation of Dreams was assuredly not the only one to witness disillusionment on such an...