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How can one at all remember the final, non-revisable loss of the victims of the historical process to whom one owes oneself, and still be happy, still find one’s identity? —Helmut Peukert, Science, Action, and Fundamental Theology, 209 (translation modified) It has often been remarked that the events of the twentieth century in particular , and, we might add, of Western modernity in general, force its inheritors to reconsider the structure and content of a ‘tradition’ that they might still feel compelled to recognize as ‘theirs,’ even if its ‘ownership,’ and the limits of the community it implies, is part of what is in question. These events—from two world wars to Vietnam, from the Holocaust to the Gulag— ask us to question the basic assumptions guiding our lives that we inherited from a past whose continued relevance and moral worth have become problematic due to the violent victimizations that they brought about. Neoliberal triumphalism responds with the counting and comparing of the victims of fascism and communism, while its own, in the past and in the present, are deemed unworthy by its increasingly centralized media conglomerates that try to write history as it happens.1 The calculation of victims takes place in an age that is marked by an increasing acceleration of technological ‘progress’ and change, and thus by a rise of calculative rationality as well as a rapid outmoding and forgetting of times that count as contemporary. Some have characterized these accelerated times as being marked by an increasing repression of death, even an incapacity to mourn for the dead in general, and the victims of political violence in particular.2 Nonetheless, current political and cultural discourses cannot avoid a less calculative response to this situation. While many countries faced with the long aftermath of direct and indirect Western colonialism, from Argentina to 1 Introduction South Africa, set up the now-famous Truth and Reconciliation Commissions ,3 the most economically developed countries, while generally averse to such commissions about their own past, witness a variety of seemingly disparate debates about the significance of assuming a memory of the victims of past historical and political violence. To name but the most contemporary and mediatized debates, we might refer to the now well-known historian’s debate of the 1980s in Germany and the discussions about the gigantic Holocaust Memorial in reunified Berlin; the political debates about the legacy of Stalinism that are particularly prevalent in Russia, but also in France and Italy with their strong Communist Parties; the political and legal questions currently resurfacing in the United States and Canada about affirmative action and the justification of privileging in certain contexts the descendants of the victims of past slavery, dispossession, genocide, and sexist exclusion. What these debates have in common is that they revolve around the issues of the manner in which historical atrocities can be remembered, given their due, and what promises they imply for the future. The discussions in and around TRCs, memorials, and histories’ victims, then, attempt to connect the memory of past violence with a promise for a just future. Regarding affirmative action, for instance, it has occasionally been observed that this largely compensatory practice is Janus-faced, that is, forward- and backward-looking at the same time.4 It is directed toward the ‘rectification’ of past injustice as well as toward the building of a more tolerant and egalitarian future. Hence, even if we, perhaps naively, believe in an ultimately final compensation or rectification of past loss and suffering, the attempt to account for it in the present takes place in view of a better and less violent future to which we promise our efforts to remember. In this way, as I will try to elaborate, the issue of memory is always linked to the question of a future promise, or perhaps even a utopia, in the broadest sense of this word, despite the fact that our times appear to have liberated themselves from the great historical narratives that project themselves onto a goal in the future. Without a more sustained reflection on the relation between memory and promise, however, the debates in question remain faced with the danger of favoring one at the expense of the other. If the memory of victimization is brought to the foreground without clear recourse to a promise of change, the insistence on violence and irretrievable loss may slip into a melancholic occlusion of the promise inherent in all useless suffering. Moreover, a peculiarly late-modern culture...

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