The Promise of Memory: History and Politics in Marx, Benjamin, and Derrida

Exordium

Among the many prosopopeitic voices, the voices of stones and of the dead, the poetry of Paul Celan has bequeathed two words to us. There is the word that might reach us through the scars of time, by way of groping fingers and through haunting darkness. Then there is the word of the shepherd, a former Spanish revolutionary. The first is a word of suffering, put to sleep by time, unrecognized by those who do not see, a word that tries to awake, a word that wishes to shine, against the odds: Engführung The Straitening [. . .] [. . .] Der Ort, wo sie lagen, er hat The place where they lay, it has einen Namen—er hat a name—it has keinen. Sie lagen nicht dort. Etwas none.They did not lie there. Something lag zwischen ihnen. Sie sahn nicht hindurch. lay between them. They did not see Sahn nicht, nein, redeten von Worten. Keines through it. Did not see, no, spoke of erwachte, der words. None awoke, Schlaf kam über sie. sleep came over them. * * [. . .] [. . .] Jahre. Years. Jahre, Jahre, ein Finger Years, years, a finger tastet hinab und hinan, tastet feels down and up, feels umher: around: Nahtstellen, fühlbar, hier seams, palpable, here klafft es weit auseinander, hier it is split wide open, here wuchs es wieder zusammen—wer it grew together again—who deckte es zu? covered it up? * * Deckte es Covered it zu—wer? up—who? Kam, kam. Came, came. Kam ein Wort, kam, Came a word, came, xi Exordium kam durch die Nacht, came through the night, wollt leuchten, wollt leuchten. wanted to shine, wanted to shine. Asche. Ash. Asche, Asche. Ash, ash. [. . .] [. . .]1 One might suggest here that the word that wishes to shine names the word of suffering opening up another history, speaking, with Levinas, against the history of the appropriation of the works of the dead and for the dead themselves , trying to recall those forgotten by time, calling us to responsibly inherit by responding to the dead.2 One might also argue, with Derrida, that the ashes reveal that “no one bears witness for the witness,” as Celan’s “Aschenglorie” has it, revealing an affinity between a date, a proper name, and ashes. As repetition and as memory, time relentlessly reduces the name of the dead to ashes, exposing every date to the wound inscribed within it, adding a second holocaust, at every hour, to the Holocaust that is “the hell of our memory.”3 And yet the question resonates: “Who covered it up?” Who—not what—covered up the scars that memory tries to retrace, like a finger groping along the seams of time through which the word must pass? Remaining ambiguous, hovering between time itself and the irresponsible inheritor, between ineluctable finitude and redressable occlusion, the cover-up indicates the night through which the word must shine while it burns to ashes. The other word grows out of the constellation of dates in order to invent a new calendar, against the forgetful calendar that, in suggesting the identity of all time with the objective time of nature, with what Benjamin calls homogenous and empty time, suppresses the singularity of what is dated in it.4 This constellation configures ‘in one’ what is otherwise separated, thus “blasting out of the continuum of history” a past “filled with the presence of ‘now,’” actualizing that which concerns the present most of all, but lies buried under the canons of cultural history.5 In Eins In One Dreizehnter Feber. Im Herzmund Thirteenth of February. Shibboleth erwachtes Schibboleth. Mit dir, roused in the heart’s mouth. With you, Peuple Peuple de Paris. No pasaràn. de Paris. No pasaràn. Schäfchen zur Linken: er, Abadias, Little sheep to the left: he, Abadias, der Greis aus Huesca, kam mit den Hunden the old man from Huesca, came with über das Feld, im Exil, his dogs over the field, in exile stand weiß wie eine Wolke white hung a cloud menschlichen Adels, er sprach of human nobility, into our hands uns das Wort in die Hand, das wir brauchten, es war he spoke the word that we needed, it Hirten-Spanisch, darin, was shepherd-Spanish, and in it EXORDIUM xii im Eislicht des Kreuzers ‘Aurora’: in icelight of the cruiser ‘Aurora’: die Bruderhand, winkend mit der the brotherly hand, waving with von den wortgroßen Augen the blindfold removed from genommenen Binde—Petropolis, der word-wide...