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  • Living with Ghosts:Brendese’s The Power of Memory in Democratic Politics
  • Lida Maxwell (bio)
P.J. Brendese, The Power of Memory in Democratic Politics. Rochester. University of Rochester Press, 2014. 324 pp. $85 (hc). ISBN: 9781580464239

Democratic politics calls for public spaces where political action can be seen and talked about. Yet it also presumes and requires a democratic temporality – a temporality that frees the people to govern themselves, liberated from the grip of the past and with the future open to their action and decisions. Without breaking from the past, the people remain mired not only in previous relations of rule, but also in unequal relationships (economic, familial, and cultural) that threaten their ability to rule themselves. Yet even as they need to break from the past in order to rule themselves, the people must somehow also engage that past if it is not to come back to haunt them, to persist in the form of ghostly threats to their self-governance. As Jed Rubenfeld puts it, “[p]roclaiming a freedom to be in the here and now, a freedom that was supposed to come from living in the present … turns out to require an interminable engagement with the past and with the future.”1

P.J. Brendese’s book, The Power of Memory in Democratic Politics, is an extended meditation on the question of how democratic citizens have addressed, and should address, memories of past injustice whose legacy persists at the level of unconscious prejudice, bias, and habit, as well as in the form of uncanny ghosts. Brendese’s basic claim is that democratic citizens need to address memories of injustice not only at the level of “active memory” – for example, through pluralizing narratives – but also at the level of “virtual memory” (habit, bias) and “haunting memory” (ghosts). For Brendese, our ability to address these various forms of memory is crucial to our ability to be self-governing: “[d]emocratization is best enabled by a continual struggle to come to terms with the various ways the past lives on in memory” (5). To put the point differently, our ability to govern ourselves well and freely changes in relation to how we deal with our memories of the past. If the past rules us, we cannot rule ourselves. Yet if we attempt to rule the past (by “getting over it” or claiming it no longer matters), we might end up being inadequately attentive to how the past rules us anyway.

Brendese argues that the liberal understanding of freedom as “freedom from the past” is insufficient to address the persistence of past constraints, prejudices, and hierarchies – especially sedimented racial prejudice and injustice. Instead, Brendese argues for an agonistic relation to the past. Specifically, he suggests that citizens must find a balance between the need to forget a past of injustice that threatens to deaden democratic possibility in the present, and the need to remember those injustices that continue to exert unjust effects on citizens now. As Brendese puts it, “a more democratic politics of memory is one that has to constantly struggle to come to terms with the tension between remembering to forget and remembering that which others cannot be expected to forget” (126).

Brendese’s examination of this double bind – the need to both remember and forget – will be familiar to readers of the literature on transitional justice and the Holocaust, where the question of how societies remember and address mass atrocity is crucial to how and whether they are able to rule themselves in the future. Brendese enters such terrain in chapters on Antigone, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and the problem of doing justice to “the disappeared” in Mexico. Yet Brendese’s book is distinguished by its engagement with the politics of racial memory in the United States and, in particular, with what he calls “segregated memory.” Segregated memory refers to divided memories of the injustice of slavery in the United States, with whites tending to remember slavery (if they remember it at all) as a past injustice that has supposedly been rectified and African-Americans experiencing that injustice as one that deeply colors their present and anchors contemporary racial injustice. Segregated memory does...

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