In Memory of Peace: Freud and Levinas on War and Peace

It is my opinion that the main reason why we rebel against war is that we cannot help doing so.

Freud, Why War?

. . . in the just war waged against war to tremble or shudder at every instant because of this very justice. This weakness is needed.

Levinas, Otherwise Than Being

In his beautiful book Vivre avec. La pensée de la mort et la mémoire des guerres, Marc Crépon describes the manner in which war haunts and weaves its way through individual and collective memory. Far from being reducible to the way memory is preconfigured by historical accounts, the memory of wars appears in a manner that is indissociable from the way death affects us, which means that it cannot be completely accounted for by these narratives, by a proper arrangement of its events and meanings. As a result, the memory (la mémoire) of war is not solely the domain of recollection (du souvenir). The memory one keeps is the result of an unresolved affection, one with which we live, but which is also fundamental to our whole being, to any living with, and to any "we" who, indissociable from the unfathomable memory of death with which we live, will always remain an open question—or perhaps even a source of unease and an ordeal. "We live," Crépon writes, "sometimes even without our being aware of it, with the memory of these affections. Our very way of thinking is in the grip of this memory, whose origin, composition, and depths are the most mysterious and unfathomable part of our existence" (2008, 187).

But if it is the relation to death (the way that it affects us) that constitutes our memory of wars, constituting us in this memory and this haunting, then does the death we live with—the death that is also constitutive of any being-with, any living-with—confine memory to the war that haunts it, thereby leaving it the final word? Living with the death of the Other, with the memory of its death, is this not to already be in the grip of something other than life, of its necessary mortality and of the ineluctable need to live that makes war inevitable? And finally, is the memory of wars able to describe our entire relation to time, history, and also the future?

In the days following the First World War, Freud concluded that war is inevitable because life is unable to move beyond its original aggression. The response to the question, "why war?" —which is also to ask, why this experience of death? why in ignominy, subjection (of others and oneself), in pleasure, terror, or even in indifference?—should be situated in the life of the psyche, in an innate and repressed, but imperishable aggression. In addition, several years before the end of the war, Freud advanced the idea that, to confront the problem of war, to come face-to-face with its truth, one had to turn to the problem of death. For Freud, what re-emerged with war wasmanin his primal state in before death, who in some respect, denies or refutes the possibility of his own death only to wish it upon a stranger or even a loved one (1915, 299). In other words, the psyche of "primal man"—that can only be accessed through a construction, as Freud himself recognized—is uninterested in altruistic considerations, such as those that civilization teaches us. And if civilized man could not bear such a harsh truth, namely, the ease with which one can wish for the death of the Other, for Freud, confronting the problem of war without illusions would require him to do so. So in 1915, Freud's essay ended with the following observation, with the following question:

War cannot be abolished; so long as the conditions of existence among nations are so different and their mutual repulsion so violent, there are bound to be wars. The question then arises: Is it not we who should give in, who should adapt...