Sacrifice and the Public Sphere

SACRIFICE AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE Colin Jager University ofMichigan The Inscription on the Memorial to Irish Freedom in Parnell Square, Dublin, reads: "O generations of freedom, remember us, the generations of the vision." The irony, of course, is that the generations of freedom to whom the inscription is addressed have yet to be born. Or rather: they/we are partly a generation of freedom, while remaining also and of necessity a generation of vision. Freedom—always partial and imperfect where it exists at all—remains bound up with vision. And violence (so the memorial tells us) is never far from vision. Is itpossible to conceive ofa public sphere free from violence? This is the question I address here with the help ofHannah Arendt. I begin by describing Arendt's distinction between the public and private realms and summarizing Seyla Benhabib's interpretation ofthese categories. Arendt, ofcourse, valued the public sphere ofcontestation that she associated with the Greek world; for her, the private realm of the household should remain completely separate from public life—the private was a place ofmere necessity, devoted solely to maintaining the physical body. According to Benhabib, we can follow Arendt in thinking of the public sphere as a place of contestation and hence of potential pain, or we can allow the concerns of the private into the public realm, and thus work to create a public sphere based on association and potential solidarity. Working out of the communicative theories of Jürgen Habermas, Benhabib tries to pull Arendt toward Habermas by emphasizing what she calls Arendt's "reluctant modernism": those elements ofher thought that move away from a sharp distinction between public and private and tend toward association and solidarity. And yet—this is the conviction that motivates this essay—history tells us that we cannot simply exchange one for the other. The poignancy ofmy epigraph springs, I think, precisely from our 58Colin Jager realization that vision never modulates easily into freedom. The monument's inscription, the very fact of its existence, links vision indissolubly with bloodshed and sacrifice, while imagining freedom as a peaceful realm beyond violence, a place ofharmony and solidarity for which the "generations ofthe vision" were willing to sacrifice themselves. Yet we are not that generation of freedom. We have not shed the burden of vision and history, for history is never simply behind us. What the eighty bloody years since the Easter uprising have taught us, if anything, is that the coming offreedom is always delayed and that the hopes for a peaceful transition from vision to freedom, agon to association, revolution to democracy, are forever marred by the reality ofa world where there is more than one vision and where continued sacrifices in the name ofvision seem to bring us no closer to peace, or to freedom. Who is the monument for, then? We must conclude that it is for us who remain somewhere between vision and freedom, forced by our own monuments to acknowledge that history that continues to infect our present. If agon and association, vision and freedom, inevitably bleed into each other, then we cannot talk realistically about one simply replacing the other. In this regard Arendt's work is crucial because it teaches us that movement from an agonistic Greek public to an associative modern public is accomplished only at the cost of displacing the distributive violence of the Greek world onto a figure ofsuffering. The necessity ofsuch suffering is the element that Benhabib, with her emphasis on the ideal communicative community, misses. Therefore, highlighting suffering helps us to understand Arendt: the suffering figures scattered through her work are the only way to make sense of her crucial notions of storytelling and forgiveness. More generally, highlighting suffering helps us understand what is at stake in any Utopian theory of the public sphere: envisioning the transition from an agonistic public sphere, defined by its relationship to violence, to a nonviolent associative public sphere of peace and communicative ethics is impossible wiüiout acknowledging those who pay the price for such a passage. Freedom, ifit does come, comes at a terrific cost—and there is no guarantee that it will still be here tomorrow. 1. Agonism and Associationism...