On the Difficulty of Living Together: Memory, Politics, and History

172 Pages·2016·0.95 MB·English

by  Manuel Cruz

on the difficulty of living together
New Directions in Critical Theory
NEW DIRECTIONS IN CRITICAL THEORY
AMY ALLEN, GENERAL EDITOR
New Directions in Critical Theory presents outstanding classic
and contemporary texts in the tradition of critical social theory,
broadly construed. The series aims to renew and advance the
program of critical social theory, with a particular focus on
theorizing contemporary struggles around gender, race, sexuality,
class, and globalization and their complex interconnections.
For a complete list of books in the series, see page 157.
on the difficulty
of living together
memory, politics, and history
Manuel Cruz
Translated by Richard Jacques
c o l u m b i a u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s — — n e w y o r k
columbia university press
Publishers Since 1893
new york chichester, west sussex
cup.columbia.edu
Copyright © 2016 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Cruz, Manuel, 1951- author.
Title: On the difficulty of living together : memory, politics, and history /
Manuel Cruz ; Translated by Richard Jacques.
Other titles: Acerca de la dificultad de vivir juntos. English
Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2016. | Series: New directions
in critical theory | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015039842 | ISBN 9780231164009 (cloth : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9780231541398 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Memory (Philosophy) | Memory—Social aspects. |
Memory—Political aspects. | Political science—Philosophy. | History—Philosophy.
Classification: LCC BD181.7 .C77713 2016 | DDC 128/.3—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015039842
Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper.
This book is printed on paper with recycled content.
Printed in the United States of America
c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing.
Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs
that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.
contents
Preface to the English Edition vii
chapter 1
Of Memory and Time
1
chapter 2
The Present Breathes Through History
11
chapter 3
For an Urgent Typology of Memory
43
chapter 4
We Need to Start Defending Ourselves from the Past
75
chapter 5
More About Traumas, Calamities, and Catastrophes
97
By Way of an Epilogue: A Future with Not Much Future
(or About How the Perplexity of the Will Is Possible)
111
Notes 123
Index 147
preface to the english edition
I have thought a good deal about which statements I should empha-
size in these opening pages. I acknowledge that I was worried
that the context this book was written in (its interpretive horizon, as
Gadamer would probably have said), so different from the one the
potential reader of this English edition inhabits, could hamper a
proper understanding. After all, my words were written in a particu-
lar reality and were trying to provide an answer to some of the ques-
tions it was raising for me. By categorizing that answer, by trying to
give it a certain abstract and general shape, I was actually putting its
universality, the value of any truth it might contain, to the test. That
is why I resisted the temptation to retouch the statements, to try to
adapt them to the different reality from which my new readers will
interpret them: there would have been something deeply dishonest
about succumbing to such a temptation. Because the best service a
text can render the person reading it is precisely to question some of
the basic, unarguable, obvious convictions that have guided him. If, in
order to protect myself from the reproach that what might have been
valid for my context is not so for my new readers, I had written the
things I supposed they were expecting, I would have deprived them
of the opportunity not so much to criticize me as to benefit from a
different look at their reality, to see it, albeit just for a second, in a
different light.
That last expectation is legitimate. Above and beyond the quite
different ways the same problems are posed in different realities,
the persistence of certain concerns leads us to suspect that we are
looking at constituent dimensions of what, using the title of one of
Arendt’s greatest works, we might well call the human condition.
Because the impulse that leads us to confront our past, to measure
ourselves against it, to try to draw from the story of what has hap-
pened lessons that will help us to go on our way freed from the worst
of ourselves is human, incorruptibly human. And hopeful of living
together in a different way, as far as they will allow us.
The question of from where the past is of interest to us is there-
fore fundamental. As a historian of philosophy concentrating on the
study of contemporary ideas, I have been gladly obliged on numer-
ous occasions to reflect on that peculiar object of thought we call
the present. An object constructed of many different elements. The
present cannot be confused with the here and now: it is the result
of a process in which, as well as our desires and expectations (which
make our reality the raw material for what does not yet exist, its
future substance), both the objectively received inheritance and the
treatment we have submitted it to occupy a central, primordial
place. It seems timely to paraphrase Sartre: the important thing is
not what they have done with us, but what we do with what they
have done with us.
That is a principle that should shed light on another paraphrase,
which provides the title of a section of chapter 3. Just as the Ameri-
can philosopher Richard Rorty was able to muster good arguments
to defend what he called “the priority of democracy to philosophy,”
I have ventured in the pages that follow to try to give good reasons
for the idea that, in relation to history, the primacy always belongs to
politics. Let us try to bring an initial line of argument that will make
the idea minimally intelligible so that the reader is in a position to
enter into its development.
Not a day goes by in newspapers, magazines, or the media in gen-
eral without some reference to the issue of memory. A short while
ago I read a newspaper interview with John Berger containing the
following noteworthy phrase: “We live under enormous pressure
to forget, to select memories.” In fact, the first thing that drew my
attention was the comment by the interviewer that prompted it:
viii—preface to the english edition
“Your book seems to be an invitation to remember, now that memory
seems to be flagging and another, poorer south is coming towards us” (my
1
emphasis, M. C.). I acknowledge that I was surprised by the casual
way in which the statement was taken for granted. Is it actually true
that memory is flagging?
We can accept that there are commonplaces, but unanimous
ones are frankly tedious. If the former are clichés, the latter are
banalities, false proofs that have been incorporated into ordinary
discourse to the point of automatism, that have become incrusted
in our language until they come to be imperceptible, making our
statements sound right in some obscure way, slipping into them a
meaning that always remains veiled. And so for some time a posi-
tive valuation of memory has been one of those undisputed, not
to say universally accepted, commonplaces. We can always argue
about whether recollection of the past is paid the attention it
deserves in practice, but what seems clear is that it is unusual today
to find someone who says he is decidedly against memory or, the
other way around, admits to being a fervent supporter of forgetting
at any price.
However, the rigid opposition between remembering and forget-
ting, in which each of the pair is allotted the positive or the nega-
tive value (with no intermediate possibilities), has not helped reach
a critical clarification of the matter. In the face of that flat opposi-
tion, we should, as in this book, introduce a more shaded perspec-
tive from which it is possible to distinguish different forms of both
remembering and forgetting in order to draw the relevant conclu-
sions. For example, that there can be healthy variants of forgetting,
as well as decidedly unhealthy (if not pathological) forms of remem-
bering. Remembering is not—cannot be—an end in itself, nor is it a
supreme, ultimate value that cannot be impugned on any grounds.
The mere exercise of memory still guarantees us nothing, however
much some people persist in arguing that it is an unambiguously
progressive activity on the sole grounds that it guarantees that we
shall not fall again into the errors of the past. As the French histo-
rian Jacques Le Goff has pointed out in his book Histoire et mémoire,
the commemoration of the past is something that also occurs under
preface to the english edition—ix