On the Difficulty of Living Together

Memory, Politics, and History

Manuel Cruz, Richard Jacques

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9780231541398
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Historiography

In On the Difficulty of Living Together, Manuel Cruz launches a nuanced study of memory and forgetting, defining their forms and uses, political meanings, and social and historical implications. Memory is not an intrinsically positive phenomenon, he argues, but an impressionable and malleable one, used to advance a variety of agendas.

Cruz focuses on five memory models: that which is inherently valuable, that which legitimizes the present, that which supports retributive justice, that which is essential to mourning, and that which elicits renunciation or revelation. His methodical approach makes sense of memory's positive and negative effects, its contradictions, and its tensions. Cruz shows us that remembering is not necessarily an end in itself, nor is it a supreme value, immune to external influence. The exercise of memory guarantees nothing, though many insist it is a progressive act preventing the repetition of past mistakes. Tying the making of memory to the movements of history, Cruz prioritizes memory's political dimensions over its philosophical aspects and helps us remember its myriad uses.

CHAPTER ONE

Of Memory and Time

In the beginning was the body. At one end of the arc we find man as a species, at the other the self, the person, the social role, society now definitively stratified: the history of humanity is the history of that journey. In animal species the self only exists, at most, as sexual preening. What they have is a primitive sympathetic reaction, which sometimes occurs in man too, but only episodically. In animals, however, it is a way of being, a deep empathy through which an individual communicates with another member of his species, and maybe even with members of other species. It is a sympathetic communication, a monstrous solidarity that does not exist in man. Nevertheless, something of it lives on in him insofar as he is endowed with a body. But any return to that animality is banned by society, because it would mean a return to the disappearance of any self, as in certain animal species. Prohibition here is not equivalent to coercion (although there may have been confinement in some periods), but to socialization of a certain kind, which culminated in the invention of the self. The process is irreversible to a large extent, according to the quality of the entities that intervene. That means, therefore, that a proposition in terms of an alternative, self or madness (identified with animality), is, with a few exceptions, mistaken because it overlooks the existence and characteristics of the process. Madness is far more bad sociality than return to animality. “Bad” in a broad sense, which would come under Jean-Paul Sartre’s maxim that hell is other people. In any case, they can be. Or is there no ingredient of madness in that useless administration of the affections and intensities that go to make up the “normal” everyday life of the majority of people? Is that ingredient not the one that bursts out as soon as that everydayness is tensed? There is a good deal of unsatisfied identity about madness.

But it is not enough to point out that the ruin of identity is the core of insanity. With that alone we would seem to be insinuating that identity is something given (albeit historically), almost natural, whose social life always poses a threat. That idea corresponds to the clichéd view of childhood as the only age of fulfillment. But identity is not a gift from anybody; it is a product, largely manufactured by ourselves from preexisting materials and according to particular rules. And identity supposes memory,¹ in a sense that goes beyond the first organization of sensation that Aristotle speaks of at the beginning of Metaphysics (common to men and animals). The memory of the subject refers fundamentally to itself: it is the first expression of self-awareness. An absolutely diverse world, in which nothing was the same as anything else, would be tantamount in its effects to a totally homogeneous one: it would be as impossible as it would be uninhabitable. The play between same and different—or difference and repetition, as others would say—begins in the subject itself, which in that way begins to shape itself as such. For if recognition is the operation through which the subject is instituted, as we said at the beginning, memory, we should add now, represents the exercise of original (self-)recognition, the movement that founds the possibility of the subject and the whole social world.²

Of course, memory is neither a faithful mirror nor a neutral receptacle. On the contrary, it is active, partial, distorting, biased. That is exactly why it intervenes in the constitution of the subject. A mirror memory would create nothing; at most it would ratify what exists. The passive image of memory seems to hide a will to ignorance of one’s own identity.³ For the same reason, the essence of memory does not begin and end in its instrumental function, however important that may be. It is true that the uses of memory are what enable us to move forward, not to have to start from scratch every time, to collect the inheritance we have been bequeathed. From this point of view, the entire history of the human spirit could be compared to the deployment of a great memory, the memory of the species. But it is no use settling into the perspective of results. The question is not so much where we are as how we got here: only in that way can we decide whether at some moment we took a wrong turn.

Memory is a human gaze at the world. And just as the eye does not see itself, memory cannot take itself as object. Memory is applied: it refers to the subject itself, first of all, and the beings in the world who are related to it, second. It only imposes one condition on its objects, and that is that they belong to the past. Memory represents a particular mechanism for activating and updating the past. A way, if you like, of fighting against one of its effects, forgetting, “that black cavern with open jaws that lurks at the bend of every road,” which the Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo talks about.⁴ The objects of memory are made of time, so much so that we might formulate as a conceptual limit that the pure object of memory is none other than time. Memory rages against the limits of time, we might say after Ludwig Wittgenstein, in the ultimate perspective of shaping a subject. Memory is an active power, which is founded on an ontological conception in terms of continuity. It glides smoothly through coherent biography, travels that space without difficulty. In fact, that coherence has been created by memory, the whole continuity of reality is an effect of it. Perhaps the most specific effect: to standardize, to put on an equal footing what is not equal in itself, because it is in a different way (what still is and what is not yet are not equally real). Memory offers us a past that comes to die tamely at out feet.

But that is only one possible use of memory. It would be a mistake to think of it as a docile instrument at the service of the individual, whose only alternative were forgetting or some kind of presentism.⁵ It has even been said, to paraphrase Louis Althusser, that the present is the new theoretical continent, as if the discovery were a far-reaching one. Indeed, if neither past nor future exist, if the only thing that does is the here and now, the condition of possibility of a great many personal anxieties disappears. Responsibility, for example, as a particular way of taking charge of one’s own past,⁶ has no place. Presentism, there can be no doubt, can be an effective remedy—surgical in the end—for someone who functions with a fatalistic or deterministic conception of time and history, such that it leads him to think that for each moment, for each situation, there is (“it is written”?) an optimal response. Naturally, not finding it can lead to bad temper, bad conscience, despair, or any other variant of unease of the spirit. But if we decide to wipe out time, everything is overcome in a single gesture. David Hume providing the gnoseological foundations for Friedrich Nietzsche and both reinterpreting Benedetto Croce: there is no danger of making a mistake because all ties have disappeared, is the conclusion. The problem is whether making the ties disappear is not tantamount to making everything disappear, starting with thought. If that is so, what is left as content of those emphatic appeals to live the here and now?

If reality is only what there is and not what there is plus the possible, as was agreed, even though that possible has a different existence, then there is very little. Behind its dizzying appearance, beyond its supposed rhetoric of seizing the day, presentism turns out to be a dictatorship of what exists, a kind of submission to what is given. The price it pays to free itself from the hypothetical scourge of the past is to prevent itself from thinking about that possible that dwells in the future. But it is not just that the idea is useless because it is so disproportionate, it is also that it is ignorant of the authentic character of what it claims to criticize. Memory is not defined by its consoling function, which is quite inessential. Its essence consists of being a condition of possibility for the existence of the past: setting the scene in which the subject has to act. In that sense, the subject is a product of memory. In the other sense, the one consecrated by ordinary language: memory as nostalgia or recollection; it is a tamed force used by the subject once it has been constituted to ratify itself in its being. Let us pause at the first. Herbert Marcuse said it many years ago in the language of the time, and he was right: “Remembrance of the past may give rise to dangerous insights, and the established society seems to be apprehensive of the subversive contents of memory. Remembrance is a form of dissociation from the given facts, a mode of ‘meditation’ which breaks, for short moments, the omnipresent power of the given facts.”⁷ Marcuse was pointing to the idea that memory preserves history. What matters now is to see how it achieves that objective.

Something has been said: it does so by shaping the subject, practicing as the active power it is. A power that goes far beyond the minute scale of the subject. Not only for what Arthur Schopenhauer said: “My own experience of many years has led me to conjecture that madness occurs in most frequent proportion among actors. But what an abuse these men make of their memory!” (my italics, M. C.), and which seems to obliquely express a certain fear of it.⁸ That fear can also be fear of the opposite kind. When Miguel de Unamuno says that “absolute, complete, true solitude consists of not even being with oneself,” he is pointing to the opposite end of dissolution, what happens when the individual loses his memory and with it his identity.⁹ Losing one’s memory means total disaffection: nobody remembers one, not even oneself. There is nobody left to exist for, to exist to. At the limit it is death. The counterpart to that annihilation would be, together with what Schopenhauer says, our tenacious resistance to forgetting. If we did not forget, would we be like gods? Perhaps, but could we bear it? Of course not. We are not only what we tell ourselves about ourselves but also what we remember, what we dare to recall. Memory confronts us with the continuity, with the permanence of reality. But accepting it and accepting ourselves is up to us. In any case, the result of acceptance is not prejudged from anywhere. The past is also resolved in what we are capable of doing with it. The exercise of that capacity could be regarded as an ethical proposal: we need to be worthy of memory.

Memory is in solidarity with time, but not with a linear concept of it. Time is not the same as calendar, just as identity is not the same as curriculum. Time, according to Plato’s maxim, is “eternity in motion.” Age is not time, but a way of trying to capture it with the body (if not with the number). History, for its part, is a time with memory, a time knowing itself, a time with awareness. A history without a subject thus designates the unthinkable: empty time, dead time. Only for the subject is history intelligible, just as only a history with a subject is intelligible. But, we should make it clear, memory does not impose a particular figure of time. What happens is that the idea of time is usually overloaded with determinations that are alien to it. There is no contradiction—more than that, it may be the only thing that is eventually possible—between accepting the challenge of memory and thinking of oneself as ageless. Age is at most a form of social administration of temporality, which takes the body as a pretext, a false support of objectivity to structure certain contents of consciousness. Like that of youth as the absolute representation of the optimal, whose most characteristic effect is the pathologization of the body itself. A pathologization, moreover, that is absolutely abstract. The sickness of the body consists of an inexorable distancing from the socially accepted (or imposed) canons. To think of oneself in terms of age is an obstacle both for relating freely to one’s own body and for taking charge of the temporal dimension of identity.

Only memory can account for the time of the subject, and it does so with the instrument that is most proper to it: language. Language is the code of memory. Its objects—the subject itself and the beings in the world related to it—acquire identity as they rise to the surface of language. The exercise of memory is not the writer’s decision, it is his destiny. A good writer is one who is capable of ordering the emotional labyrinths of childhood and adolescence around certain primary sensations, emotions, truths, and realities. That is the way identity takes shape: acknowledging its products, objectifying itself thanks to memory. Later, when that identity ceases to be an object of the story and accedes to language, i.e., becomes a point of view, it will be free to face up to its condition. In Tractatus 6.4311 it says: “Eternal life belongs to those who live in the present”¹⁰ (understanding by eternity, as explained in the Diary dated 8-7-16, “not infinite temporal duration but timelessness”).¹¹ Wittgenstein removes the self from the course of time. The self is the center of life not because it is in life, but because it is that vantage point from which everyone sees life. This is a way of fighting against time on the basis of trying to escape from it (not to deny it). But a way, in the end, that a subject bent on the particular goal of being happy bestows upon itself. Nothing changes in our idea, because that subject prefers to remain in the shadows. The aspiration to nonidentity identifies just as much as any other.

The only way of deciding between options is to consider the importance of what they exclude or the value of what they are in no position to think. Death, in Wittgenstein’s case. “For life in the present there is no death” or “Death is not an event in life. It is not a fact of the world” are some of his statements with an ingenuous Epicurean resonance.¹² But we have known since Hegel that death lives a human life. The death of others lives in us, leaves the painful trace of their absence. And our own death, which we cannot help anticipating. In that sense it is the threshold of anticipatory consciousness. We are a web of memories and anticipations, “mixing / Memory and desire,” as T. S. Eliot said of life, recalled by Emilio Lledó in another context: the present is that crossroads.¹³ Perhaps we should not respect it so much. Perhaps we should not recoil so quickly from fear of pain (“pain gives its curative virtue where we least expect it,” Martin Heidegger).¹⁴ The freeze frame of the present makes us unthinkable. We should take other models, like that of the poet Jaime Gil de Biedma, who saved himself one day and then wrote about his feigned death.¹⁵ Since we are an opening to the future, we dare to think of our own death as a determination of that future. To go beyond the idea of death as a negative limit, as mere no longer, and integrate it into life. To seize death from nature and turn it into a human determination.¹⁶ To take charge of it, in short (suicide is as bad as the yearning for posterity).

Something similar could be said about the displeasure that recollection of the past can sometimes arouse. The rejection of nostalgia, as an extreme form of that movement, may merely tell of our incapacity to face the memory of what has happened. It is true that nostalgia has a bad name, to a large extent justified. For example, insofar as it means the glorification of an imaginary moment, distant in time. It is tantamount to accepting that the most important, the most significant part of one’s own existence, has already taken place. It is common to locate that moment or moments in adolescence or early adulthood, and so the operation takes on a strangely fatalistic note. Because those events that now return in the shape of recollection were not fundamentally free actions, but new experiences that overwhelmed us in their intensity. And so that is what seems to be recollected (because it is desired?): a time when the world was full of new meanings. It matters little whether things really happened in the way one misses them. Memory is an active power and nostalgia an agitation of the present moment. Those things at the time were imperfect, bittersweet, if not actually disagreeable. Recollection is the act through which we decide to be a project or a mere epigone of that now distant original experience.

However, not everything about nostalgia is bad. It is a way, perhaps shot through with sadness (“the metaphysical matter of nostalgia is comparable to the echo of the fall, of the loss of paradise”),¹⁷ Emil Cioran of putting the past to work, of mobilizing it, of breathing new life into it. An activity that easily sends us back disturbing images of ourselves, a way into knowledge of our own identity, nostalgia is an effective antidote against the alternative danger to the glorification of the past, the glorification of the present. The supposed ontological dignity of the present, which it could only acquire by the fact that it is the only thing that really exists, is untenable for the reasons I have mentioned. Of many presents we would have to say that it would have been better if they had never existed, just as the great advantage of the past is to be definitively sheltered from the evils of the present. The question cannot be posed in terms of deciding which moment has primacy: past, present, or future. That would also mean lapsing into the clichéd figure of linear time. The virtue of nostalgia, as a specific affection of memory, consists of standing before the evidence of our temporal condition.¹⁸

Therefore, when someone argues that the only reality is the present, they are making a partially true statement, but at all events an irrelevant one. The present is not a value in itself, that is the mistake. Its wealth is only revealed when it is interpreted from the wisdom of the past or the hopes of the future. Without that temporal dimension, any reality appears flat, without relief. The child whom the adult tells “now you are happy” pulls a disbelieving face, and quite rightly.

The discourse about any moment, its effective spiritual apprehension, is always made from outside it, especially by mobilizing that whole store of recollections that make up memory. A mere appeal to living the present turns out to be an empty slogan. The present is also made of time. What remains when the temporal dimension is extracted from that present is tedium. It is no accident that lately people are talking about it so much again. First, the environment is showing a growing degree of resistance. The given seems to be weaving a cordon around us that we cannot cross with our projects. What there is is seen as a sentence. Moreove...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Preface to the English Edition
• 1. Of Memory and Time
• 2. The Present Breathes Through History
• 3. For an Urgent Typology of Memory
• 4. We Need to Start Defending Ourselves from the Past
• 5. More About Traumas, Calamities, and Catastrophes
• By Way of an Epilogue: A Future with Not Much Future (or About How the Perplexity of the Will Is Possible)
• Notes
• Index
• Series List