wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. (“Theses on the Philosophy of History” 257-58)
The Angel of history tells us that historical time is not to be conceived of as historical continuum, that the transition to a new phase of national history is not set on the trajectory of linear development and teleological progress, as a historicist would argue. It is imperative to focus on every single historical moment as a monad and perceive the transition as the constellation, the threshold between the past and the present. The transition is the site of struggle between progress and debris, between the mission to build a new and normalized country and the ethical imperative to be
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responsible to and for those buried in the historical wreckages.
To understand our ethical responsibility for those buried in historical debris, we need to know that history does not merely manifest itself in the collection of facts, in the representation of what really happened. As Benjamin writes, “To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger” (254). This moment of danger is the moment of “redemption” (Benjamin 254), the site of
“unrealized possibility” (Levine 5) made possible by the Messianic intervention, the blasting open of historical continuum. As Derrida suggests, we need “another thinking of history” that is “beyond the metaphysical concept of history and the end of history” (Derrida, Specters 70), so we need to think the impossible moment of danger that bears the possibility for the emergence of the unrealized, of those buried in historical wreckages.
The political act of retrospective visit involves the struggle between consensus and contestation. The incoming governments in many post-conflict societies have relied on the institution of truth commissions to look into the violence of the national past with the political necessity to generate consensus among the people in the quest of reconciliation and normalization; however, politicians discovered that they cannot afford to lose the control of history, which would endanger the legitimacy of their rule. It happens that while the state intends to produce consensus on historical representation through the manipulation of collective memory, memory, in its singular aspect, would contest the construction of coherent narratives that seek to reduce the diversity and incommensurability of personal memory. This dynamics of consensus and contestation, embodied in the political intention to close and the
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ethical demand of opening, concerns not so much about the veracity of historical truth as how the past is understood and what is allowed in the officially approved archive of remembrance. Framed in this struggle between consensus and contestation, memory is the site of struggle for meaning, for determining the relation with the past.
The utopian society in The Childhood is characterized with a sense of historical closure that prevents any further engagement with the past. The demand of closure is seen in the residents’ consistent denial of their having a past (or at least in their lack of interest in mentioning it), and in their persistent demand that Simon and David forget their life prior to their arrival at Novilla. The past and the present are perceived as two distinctive periods in the historical succession, and the general attitude toward the past is that it is, taken literally, another country. By refusing to acknowledge the relevance of the past to the present, the residents of Novilla are immersed in collective amnesia. What is intriguing in the novel is that we do not even know what they intend to forget. No information of their life before they set on the journey to cross the ocean to Novilla is revealed. We (re)visit the past in order to define the present, and yet these people automatically set up a point in time and delete all memory before that temporal point. Emily Keightley and Michael Pickering tell us that we use the past to fund the present and the future (139), yet the Novilla residents give up on any relation with the past, resulting in an essential emptiness of the present and the future. The present is decoupled from the past, and the past’s indexicality to redemption and its unrealized potentiality are disavowed.
Paul Ricoeur writes that a utopia that does not keep its promise remains an empty utopia: “all utopias would be empty were it not for the reactivation of unkept
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promises” (“Memory and Forgetting” 10). Despite its deceptively normalized life, Novilla turns out to be a utopia that fails to keep its “promises” toward history, toward the infinite others with whom they have formed some sort of undeniable existential relation. Their view is narrowly limited to the ontologically enclosed present without seeing that the present cannot close in on itself, that each single moment of the present is exposed to enigmatic and incommensurable doubling relation with the past, a relation that might disrupt the present and open it to the future to come.
The failure of “unkept promises” also characterized the post-apartheid South African mentality in its political imperative to address the legacies of the previous dark period. The state knew that the voices of victims had to be heard3 if it were to capitalize on the values of democratic freedom and equality for a successful political transition. The political will to look into past atrocities led to the institutionalization of the TRC with the mission to document the apartheid violence and to give meaning to the past events during the three decades between 1960 and 1994. The “Preamble”
to the “Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act, 1995” states that the purpose of the TRC is “to establish the truth in relation to past events as well as the motives for and circumstances in which gross violations of human rights occurred, and to make the findings known in order to prevent a repetition of such acts in future”
(para. 9; qtd. in Dawes). A fair account of the TRC work would indicate that the TRC was indeed perceived as an impressive example of how the truth commission can contribute to the peaceful transition from a totalitarian regime to a democratic rule,
3 Dominick LaCapra notes that the TRC provided “a quasi-judicial setting in which the truth was sought and some measure of justice rendered” and that it also served as a “forum for the voices—often the suppressed, repressed, or uneasily accommodated voices—of certain victims who were being heard for the first time in the public sphere” (696).
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though its critics have also pointed out its problems.4 The problem that concerns the ethics of memory is how the attitude toward the past that informed the TRC archiving work has led to national amnesia.
To say that the post-apartheid South African society was plagued by “unkept promises” means that the TRC archiving practice is essentially an exercise in forgetting (Derrida, “Archive Fever” 54), the forgetting of those whose testimonies fail to fit into the paradigm of national development, and those who fail to testify for themselves (as we can imagine, those who were dead and those who were unwilling to come forward and testify in public). The vision of the post-apartheid Angel of history was set on the future and turns his back against the past. The TRC’s attitude toward the past was inscribed in political pragmatism and legal ideal of “no longer,”
“no more,” and “never again” ensured by the means of human rights activism, truth commission and juridical proceedings. What this political pragmatism in the form of the TRC work could achieve is quite limited as it was grounded in the assumption that the truth of abuses and violations of human rights could be fully accounted for through legal means (that is, to paint the most complete picture) and losses of innocent life could be mourned and suffering healed in the “ritual-like” occasions in the public space where the victims were encouraged to come forward and give
4 A major problem is that the TRC suffered from the “confusion between law and religion” (van Heerden 49), and this confusion rendered its position ambivalent in addressing the question of justice.
The TRC was founded as a legal institution, and yet it was expected to perform a religious function:
“[T]he demons and traumas of the violent apartheid past needed to be cleansed from the body politic through a cathartic and theological process of truth-telling, confession, healing, reconciliation, [and]
national redemption” (Steven Robins 126). The TRC employed moral discourses of ubuntu (the African philosophy of humanism), reconciliation and forgiveness, and “claim[ed] for itself a quasi-religious status by demanding demonstrations of remorse, repentance, confession and reformation of character” (ibid). This institution was plagued by the problem of “how an instrument of truth and reconciliation can turn into an instrument of bad social control in the absence of a clear moral vision and an intelligent understanding of the difference between spirituality and legality” (ibid). Stemming from this confusion is people’s doubt of its function to grant amnesty to the perpetrators who would come forward and reveal the truth of violence they had committed. Does it grant amnesty based on its legal or moral authority?
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testimonies for their experiences of suffering and the perpetrators would confess for the wrongs and even crimes they had committed against the black citizens. The ultimate aim was to help South Africa work through the trauma and losses of the past and normalize the country.
Given the mission to look into the past in order to remember, the TRC’s ultimate aim, however, was to “finish history” by drawing the process of constructing the narrative of national remembrance to a definitive conclusion. The TRC archiving work started as an opening into the atrocities in the past, yet the work was self-defeated for it limited its investigation between March 1, 1960 and May 10, 1994 with the hope to close “a horrendous chapter in the life of our nation” (Verne Harris 162). The institution of the TRC attempted to shape the collective memory in the post-apartheid period, as if it could write the script and expect the people to perform and shape their individual memory according to the official narrative. The TRC archiving project tended to universalize and impose an overarching framework of collective memories by excluding the difficult memories that did not fit into the teleological framework and national agenda of normalization and modernization. In other words, it selected “testimonies that reinforce [its] pre-existing ideals” and overlooked “‘difficult’ testimonies that reveal experiences outside the dictates of collective memory” (Waxman 5).
The individual memory is often at odds with one another, while collective memory seeks unity and conformity. Ruptures are smoothed over, and dissonance is hushed, as Maurice Halbwachs says, “[T]he collective memory endures and draws strength from its base in a coherent body of people” (48). As each individual is located in a specific group “delimited in space and time” (ibid 84), their memory is
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determined by the shared communal experience. The authority manipulates the collective memory by facilitating its form, coherence and organization for a collective identity. In her critique of collective memory, Sontag maintains, “[I]deologies create substantiating archives of images, representative images, which encapsulate common ideas of significance and trigger predictable thoughts, feelings” (86). While it is possible that the individual may remember the past in his or her own way, that recollection eventually has to be brought into the jurisdiction of the collective remembrance. The post-apartheid collective memory stipulates that the history of this country under apartheid is full of violence and division, and now with a new democratic government in place the country should seek redemption from the curse of violence and recovery from wounds and trauma.
To finish history is to forget the past by the seal of an officially approved narrative of national remembrance. The monumentalists5 of history scrap the memories that do not fit into the national narrative structure, essentially forgetting those downtrodden in the traces of history, as Bernard-Dona maintains, “the forgetfulness that inheres in memory is oriented to others” (29). The state needs to control history by forgetting the memories of those who might disrupt official historiography and by erasing their traces: “As far as forgetting is concerned, this memory of the memorial is intensely selective; it requires the forgetting of that which may question the community and its legitimacy” (Lyotard 7). Paul Ricoeur also argues that the authorities rely on the monopoly of historical narrative to maintain its power: “[H]igher powers take over this emplotment [narrative] and impose a canonical narrative by means of intimidation or seduction, fear or flattery” and by
5 This refers to Nietzsche’s idea of “monumental history” in “Use and Abuse of History.”
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“stripping the social actors of their original power to recount their actions themselves” (Memory, History and Forgetting 448). To secure the public acceptance, the state commemorates official history at the expense of the personal memory.
Donald G. Reagan writes, “[I]f there is an official, authorized, commemorated history, there is also an official forgetting of those forbidden things about which one does not have the right to remember” (314). In this logic, if an event is not commemorated, it is not considered as part of history. To be registered as part of national history, an event has to be commemorated; otherwise, it is subjected to the fate of forgetting.
However, commemorated history is grounded in “institutional truth” in contrast to the “individual truth.” In “The Truth according to the TRC,” Mamdani distinguishes two types of truth: the individual truth and the institutional truth. The former is opposed to power while the latter is linked to power in the way that it works to reinforce the sovereignty (177). For Mamdani, truth is irreducible to an officially approved version, to verifiable and dialogical truth.He argues, “[T]he TRC’s version of truth was established through narrow lenses, crafted to reflect the experience of a tiny minority.” He continues, “The tiny minority included two groups, on the one hand perpetrators, being state agents, and on the other, victims, being political activists, and the two groups were linked to power. The TRC defined over 20,000 South Africans as the ‘victims’ of apartheid, leaving the vast majority in the proverbial cold” (178). The rationale behind the TRC narrative falls into the politics of exclusion and the economy of calculation: Only “over 20,000” victims belonging to the two tiny minority groups will count while an infinite number of victims are simply left out.
The official historiography structuring the TRC is fundamentally based on linear
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temporality and “meta-politics of closure” (Barnard 103), and it played a dominating role in determining the contour of collective remembrance. This “meta-politics of closure” underlies both Novilla residents’ denial of ever having a past and the state-manipulated collective amnesia in the post-apartheid South African society.
The decision to investigate the violence during the three decades between 1960 and 1994 when apartheid was officially implemented and abolished respectively illustrates the historiographical structure of temporal insularity—by compartmentalizing and periodizing historical periods, the state was able to limit the periods of investigation within a manageable scope and comprehend each single historical moment as a complete and enclosed unit within itself without considering the interlocking relationship between these historical moments and the inseparable relationship between the past and present. Berber Bevernage points out that “the TRC suffers a short memory span and that it potentially facilitates social amnesia instead of forging a new collective memory” (48). The new democratic government, with its enclosed historical framework, took up its share of a limited responsibility while dodging a greater responsibility: those who suffered violence prior to 1960 would be neither the concern nor the responsibility of the ANC government. In this way, the state was able to evade the questions about the policies that had caused racial discrimination and legal violence against the black and other subaltern population prior to the 1960, the policies that had directly or indirectly contributed to the legitimization of apartheid in 1960. At the same time, while the 1994 marked the end of apartheid and the state put an end point to this historical event institutionally and symbolically through the TRC work, could it also put an end point to the impasse of traumatic recurrence, the lingering influences, repercussion, and
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compulsive repetition of the traumatic memories?
History cannot be finished, and we can never come to an end of history. If history were to be closed, it would be what Benjamin called the document of barbarism. In terms of the TRC archival work, no archives can be completed once and for all, as all archives are haunted by specters and are subjected to messianic intervention. The desire for closure and unity in history is at the same time compromised by the dissonance and fracturing of memory. The apartheid was indeed many events in the sense that each person’s experience of this traumatic event was singular and resisted to be captured within the official framework, and yet the state recognized only the version it sanctioned. It is perhaps not so ironic and paradoxical to say that the post-apartheid South Africa “suffer[ed] from too much history, and too little history” (van Tonder 43): The experience of each of the victims of apartheid was different from that of another person, yet what the state was willing to archive is minimal. As apartheid lasted for decades (as we can imagine, for those oppressed, each moment of suffering could be magnified infinitely into a boundless length of time), the violence it caused was hard to be calculated in technical terms, and the trauma it had caused swelled into a vortex of pain and suffering that have engulfed the entire black population. There were infinite witness accounts the TRC could have collected, but it turned out that the state archived only a number of selected testimonies.
Derrida points out a couple of reasons why the archive can never be closed.
Firstly, even if the archive work is finished, that is, closed officially and its record published, it is still “open infinitely to readings, interpretation, contestation and so on, so this closure is not a final closure” (Archive Fiver 76). Even if the TRC has closed its
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work and published its official report in four volumes, the legacies of apartheid were still much debated in the post-apartheid period. Secondly, archive is marked by “the messianic” (ibid 46). The archive is not a space of historicist realism that produces definitive account of the past based on historical analysis. Through the messianic intervention, it is possible to witness the contingencies, silences and gaps within the archival narrative. Beneath the official narrative of national remembrance are indeterminate layers of traces that resist identification and representation. The trace does not assume identifiable form and exceeds the “plenitude” of the metaphysics of the present. The trace in history is besides the metaphysical conceptualization of a
work and published its official report in four volumes, the legacies of apartheid were still much debated in the post-apartheid period. Secondly, archive is marked by “the messianic” (ibid 46). The archive is not a space of historicist realism that produces definitive account of the past based on historical analysis. Through the messianic intervention, it is possible to witness the contingencies, silences and gaps within the archival narrative. Beneath the official narrative of national remembrance are indeterminate layers of traces that resist identification and representation. The trace does not assume identifiable form and exceeds the “plenitude” of the metaphysics of the present. The trace in history is besides the metaphysical conceptualization of a