Loss: The Politics of Mourning

Loss

Loss The Politics of Mourning

EDITED BY

David L. Eng and David Kazanjian with an Afterword by Judith Butler

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley

Los Angeles

London

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England 䉷 2003 by the Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Loss : the politics of mourning / edited by David L. Eng and David Kazanjian ; with an afterword by Judith Butler. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0–520–23235–6 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 0–520–23236–4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Social history—20th century. 2. Loss (Psychology)—Social aspects. 3. Psychic trauma—Social aspects. 4. Melancholy—Social aspects. 5. Melancholy in literature. I. Eng, David L., 1967– II. Kazanjian, David, 1967– HN16 .L67 2003 306'.09'04—dc21 2002007572

Manufactured in the United States of America 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).䡬 ⬁

contents

list of illustrations / preface / ix

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Introduction: Mourning Remains David L. Eng and David Kazanjian

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i. bodily remains Returning the Body without Haunting: Mourning “Nai Phi” and the End of Revolution in Thailand Rosalind C. Morris

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29

Black Mo’nin’ Fred Moten

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59

Ambiguities of Mourning: Law, Custom, and Testimony of Women before South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission Mark Sanders

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77

Catastrophic Mourning Marc Nichanian

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Between Genocide and Catastrophe David Kazanjian and Marc Nichanian

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125

Passing Shadows: Melancholic Nationality and Black Critical Publicity in Pauline E. Hopkins’s Of One Blood Dana Luciano

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148

Melancholia and Moralism Douglas Crimp

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188

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ii. spatial remains The Memory of Hunger David Lloyd

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205

Remains to Be Seen: Reading the Works of Dean Sameshima and Khanh Vo Susette Min

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229

Mourning Becomes Kitsch: The Aesthetics of Loss in Severo Sarduy’s Cobra Vilashini Cooppan

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251

Theorizing the Loss of Land: Griqua Land Claims in Southern Africa, 1874–1998 David Johnson

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278

Left Melancholy Charity Scribner

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300

iii. ideal remains All Things Shining Kaja Silverman

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323

A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia David L. Eng and Shinhee Han

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343

Passing Away: The Unspeakable (Losses) of Postapartheid South Africa Yvette Christiansë

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372

Ways of Not Seeing: (En)gendered Optics in Benjamin, Baudelaire, and Freud Alys Eve Weinbaum

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396

Legacies of Trauma, Legacies of Activism: ACT UP’s Lesbians Ann Cvetkovich

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427

Resisting Left Melancholia Wendy Brown

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458

Afterword: After Loss, What Then? Judith Butler

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contributors / name index / 479

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illustrations

Khanh Vo, April 25, 1975 (resonance) /

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Dean Sameshima, In Between Days (Without You), red bed / Dean Sameshima, In Between Days (Without You), white bed / Khanh Vo, April 25, 1975 (resonance), detail /

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Anonymous postcard, portrait of the deities Lakshmi and Ganesha / 268 Bathroom Installation, curated by Andreas Ludwig / Joseph Beuys, Economic Values (Wirtschaftswerte) / Frans Masereel, The City /

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Frans Masereel, La Nuit /

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preface

Dean Sameshima’s In Between Days (Without You) is a series of fifteen eightby-ten-inch color photographs of twin beds taken in underground gay sex clubs. Considered in isolation, Sameshima’s red bed, a photograph from this series (see page 237) would seem to invoke privatized loss: an absent body, an empty space, thwarted desire. However, In Between Days (Without You) complicates this interpretation. As Susette Min argues in her essay for Loss, the successive repetition of Sameshima’s images—each flooded by an alternate hue and marked by a different arrangement of details—addresses loss not as an individual but as a collective process. The underground gay sex clubs bring the private into an alternative public sphere. The rumpled beds suggest not only the departure but also the imminent arrival of bodies. These arrivals, in turn, transform thwarted desires into desirous anticipations. In Between Days (Without You) thus offers a counterintuitive understanding of lost bodies, spaces, and ideals by configuring absence as a potential presence. Loss as a whole embraces this counterintuitive perspective. Instead of imputing to loss a purely negative quality, the essays in this collection apprehend it as productive rather than pathological, abundant rather than lacking, social rather than solipsistic, militant rather than reactionary. Indeed, they assert that the pervasive losses of the twentieth century are laden with creative, political potential. They insist that, if loss is known only by what remains of it, then the politics and ethics of mourning lie in the interpretation of what remains—how remains are produced and animated, how they are read and sustained. Loss went into production prior to the events of September 11, 2001. The violence of the tragedy and its militaristic aftermath foreground the profound relationship between loss and the politics of mourning. The ix

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essays in this collection provide crucial understandings of the particular losses they explore. We hope that they also orient more complex understandings of September 11 and offer more progressive challenges to the current “war on terrorism.”

Loss has been an inspiring project, primarily because of the compelling work of our numerous contributors. We would like to thank them for all of their efforts. We are especially grateful to Judith Butler for her encouragement of this project. In addition, Loss has been sustained, challenged, and enriched by a number of colleagues and comrades, whom we can hardly thank enough: Emma Bianchi, Brent Edwards, Jeff Fort, Shinhee Han, Amy Kaplan, Anahid Kassabian, Teemu Ruskola, María Josefina Saldaña, and Kaja Silverman. For their incisive comments, we would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers of the collection. And for shepherding Loss through the publication process, we thank Linda Norton, Randy Heyman, Sue Heinemann, Robin Whitaker, and Barbara Jellow at the University of California Press. An earlier version of Mark Sanders’s essay appeared in Law, Text, Culture 4, no. 2 (1998): 105–51. David Lloyd’s essay is adapted from two previous essays by him: “The Memory of Hunger,” in Irish Hunger: Personal Reflections on the Legacy of Famine (Boulder, Colo.: Roberts Rinehart, 1997), pp. 32– 47, and “Colonial Trauma/Postcolonial Recovery?” Interventions 2, no. 2 (2000): 212–28. David L. Eng and Shinhee Han’s essay first appeared in Psychoanalytic Dialogues: A Journal of Relational Perspectives 10, no. 4 (2000): 667–700 (published by The Analytic Press). An earlier version of Wendy Brown’s essay appeared as “Resisting Left Melancholy” in boundary 2, 26, no. 3 (fall 1999): 19–27. (Copyright 1997, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.) We gratefully acknowledge the publishers and authors for permission to reprint these essays. Dean Sameshima’s work appears courtesy of the artist and LOW, Los Angeles. Khanh Vo’s work appears courtesy of the artist. The photograph of the Open Depot Museum—Bathroom Installation (1997)—appears courtesy of Alan Chin. Joseph Beuys, Economic Values, 1980, installation view, appears courtesy of Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Frans Masereel’s images appear courtesy of Random House, the Art Gallery of Windsor, and Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bildkunst, Bonn; The City, which was first published in 1925, has been republished by Dover Publications (1972) and Random House/Schocken (1988). David L. Eng and David Kazanjian New York

David L. Eng and David Kazanjian

Introduction Mourning Remains To historians who wish to relive an era, Fustel de Coulanges recommends that they blot out everything they know about the later course of history. There is no better way of characterizing the method with which historical materialism has broken. That method is a process of empathy whose origin is the indolence of the heart, acedia, which despairs of grasping and holding the genuine historical image as it flares up briefly. Among Medieval theologians it was regarded as the root cause of sadness. Flaubert, who was familiar with it, wrote: “Peu de gens devineront combien il a fallu être triste pour ressusciter Carthage.” The nature of this sadness stands out more clearly if one asks with whom the adherents of historicism actually empathize. The answer is inevitable: with the victor. walter benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”

Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940) might be described as a treatise on the political and ethical stakes of mourning remains—mourning what remains of lost histories as well as histories of loss. According to Benjamin, to mourn the remains of the past hopefully is to establish an active and open relationship with history. This practice—what Benjamin calls “historical materialism”—is a creative process, animating history for future significations as well as alternate empathies. For the historical materialist, to relive an era is not to “blot out everything” one knows “about the later course of history”—simply to bring memory to the past. On the contrary, reliving an era is to bring the past to memory. It is to induce actively a tension between the past and the present, between the dead and the living. In this manner, Benjamin’s historical materialist establishes a continuing dialogue with loss and its remains—a flash of emergence, an instant of emergency, and most important a moment of production. The eighteen essays and afterword collected in Loss engage just such moments of production. In advocating historical materialism’s approach to mourning remains, Benjamin also warns of political and ethical misappropriations of loss. He thus contrasts historical materialism with historicism, describing the latter process as an encrypting of the past from a singular, empathetic point of view: that of the victor. Benjamin isolates the historicist propensity to relive 1

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the past as inexorable fixity, a tendency he names acedia, whose origin is the “indolence of the heart.” This indolence not only insists upon a hegemonic identification with the victor’s perspective but also preempts history’s other possible accounts. Historicism’s desire to “grasp” and to “hold” on to the fleeting images of the past—to create fixed and totalizing narratives from those fleeting images—precipitates despair, because such narratives are finally not only illusive but also elusive. As the “root cause of sadness,” historicism’s fixing of the remains of the past is hopeless. In “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” then, we witness the precarious struggle of a hopeful historical materialism against a hopeless historicism, of an active mourning against a reactive acedia. As Charity Scribner and Wendy Brown both observe in their contributions to Loss, Benjamin proffers a continuous double take on loss—one version moves and creates, the other slackens and lingers. Although it is always haunted by acedia, mourning need not be given over in every instance to the regressive fate of a historicism bent on permanence and fixity, sustained by and endorsing an empathy with history’s victorious hegemonies. Indeed, the politics of mourning might be described as that creative process mediating a hopeful or hopeless relationship between loss and history. The essays in Loss collectively examine this process, exploring how loss has been animated for hopeful and hopeless politics. To impute to loss a creative instead of a negative quality may initially seem counterintuitive. As a whole, Loss inhabits this counterintuitive perspective. We might say that as soon as the question “What is lost?” is posed, it invariably slips into the question “What remains?” That is, loss is inseparable from what remains, for what is lost is known only by what remains of it, by how these remains are produced, read, and sustained. Indeed, this anthology insists that the dawn of the twenty-first century is a moment when the pervasive losses of the twentieth century need to be engaged from the perspective of what remains. Such a perspective, these essays suggest, animates history through the creation of bodies and subjects, spaces and representations, ideals and knowledges. This attention to remains generates a politics of mourning that might be active rather than reactive, prescient rather than nostalgic, abundant rather than lacking, social rather than solipsistic, militant rather than reactionary. These essays examine both individual and collective encounters with twentieth-century historical traumas and legacies of, among others, revolution, war, genocide, slavery, decolonization, exile, migration, reunification, globalization, and AIDS. In this collection, “loss” functions as a placeholder of sorts—what Freud calls in The Interpretation of Dreams a “theoretical fiction.”1 “Loss” names what is apprehended by discourses and practices of mourning, melancholia, nostalgia, sadness, trauma, and depression. In particular, Loss focuses upon the shifting meanings of melancholia, a

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theoretical concept with a long and expansive pedigree dating to classical times (explored in the following sections of this introduction). As both a formal relation and a structure of feeling, a mechanism of disavowal and a constellation of affect, melancholia offers a capaciousness of meaning in relation to losses encompassing the individual and the collective, the spiritual and the material, the psychic and the social, the aesthetic and the political. After Freud it has become ever more important to consider an intellectual and political genealogy of loss through melancholia. In “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), Freud writes that “mourning is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on.”2 Freud’s observations on the overlapping qualities of the lost object—a person or an abstraction—provides the theoretical frame organizing the three parts of this collection: “Bodily Remains,” “Spatial Remains,” and “Ideal Remains.” Moreover, in describing melancholia as a confrontation with loss through the adamant refusal of closure, Freud also provides another method of interpreting loss as a creative process. In “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud attempts to draw a clear distinction between these two mental states. He contends that mourning is a psychic process in which libido is withdrawn from a lost object. This withdrawal cannot be enacted at once. Instead, libido is detached bit by bit so that eventually the mourner is able to declare the object dead and to move on to invest in new objects. In contrast with mourning, Freud describes melancholia as an enduring devotion on the part of the ego to the lost object. A mourning without end, melancholia results from the inability to resolve the grief and ambivalence precipitated by the loss of the loved object, place, or ideal. Throughout “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud endeavors to characterize the melancholic’s sustained devotion to the lost object as not only pathological but also antithetical to the ego’s well-being, indeed, its continued survival. Thus, he opposes melancholia to “normal mourning.” Yet, Freud also casts doubt on the inevitability of this distinction when he writes, “It is really only because we know so well how to explain [mourning] that this attitude does not seem to us pathological.”3 Were one to understand melancholia better, Freud implies, one would no longer insist on its pathological nature. In this spirit, we suggest that a better understanding of melancholic attachments to loss might depathologize those attachments, making visible not only their social bases but also their creative, unpredictable, political aspects. For instance, we might observe that in Freud’s initial conception of melancholia, the past is neither fixed nor complete. Unlike mourning, in which the past is declared resolved, finished, and dead, in melancholia the past

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remains steadfastly alive in the present. By engaging in “countless separate struggles” with loss,4 melancholia might be said to constitute, as Benjamin would describe it, an ongoing and open relationship with the past—bringing its ghosts and specters, its flaring and fleeting images, into the present. In this regard, we find in Freud’s conception of melancholia’s persistent struggle with its lost objects not simply a “grasping” and “holding” on to a fixed notion of the past but rather a continuous engagement with loss and its remains. This engagement generates sites for memory and history, for the rewriting of the past as well as the reimagining of the future. While mourning abandons lost objects by laying their histories to rest, melancholia’s continued and open relation to the past finally allows us to gain new perspectives on and new understandings of lost objects. Sustained forms of mourning such as melancholia can be said to figure what Fred Moten theorizes in his essay for this collection as “an insight that is manifest as a kind of magnification or intensification of the object.” In this sense, melancholia raises the question of what makes a world of new objects, places, and ideals possible. At the same time, what are the psychic mechanisms—the modes of being and the affective registers—that make investment in that new world imaginable and thinkable? Ultimately, we learn, the work of mourning is not possible without melancholia. In The Ego and the Id (1923), Freud comes to this conclusion by understanding that the ego is constituted through the remains of abandoned object-cathexes. As a psychic entity, the ego is composed of the residues of its accumulated losses.5 In The Psychic Life of Power, Judith Butler expands upon this revised notion of melancholia, arguing that the incorporative logic of melancholia founds the very possibility of the ego and its psychic topography. Butler observes that melancholia is “precisely what interiorizes the psyche, that is, makes it possible to refer to the psyche through such topographical tropes. The turn from object to ego is the movement that makes the distinction between them possible, that marks the division, the separation or loss, that forms the ego to begin with.”6 Put otherwise, melancholia is the precondition for both the ego and the work of mourning. It is precisely the ego’s melancholic attachments to loss that might be said to produce not only psychic life and subjectivity but also the domain of remains. That is, melancholia creates a realm of traces open to signification, a hermeneutic domain of what remains of loss. In Black Sun, Julia Kristeva describes melancholia’s inexorable grief as the “signifier’s flimsiness.”7 Rather than thinking about this flimsiness as the impossibility of representation—as the signifier’s inadequacy to express its lost referent—might we interpret it in terms of an extended flexibility, an expanded capacity for representation? That is, can we describe melancholia as facilitating the work of mourning by creating numerous disparate bodies, places, and ideals composing the symbolic world? Might we say that the

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work of mourning remains becomes possible through melancholia’s continued engagement with the various and ongoing forms of loss—as Freud writes, “of a loved person” or “some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on”? The ability of the melancholic object to express multiple losses at once speaks to its flexibility as a signifier, endowing it with not only a multifaceted but also a certain palimpsest-like quality. This condensation of meaning allows us to understand the lost object as continually shifting both spatially and temporally, adopting new perspectives and meanings, new social and political consequences, along the way. The “and so on” of Freud’s passage gestures toward such an interpretation. This “and so on” marks a melancholic excess—an abundance implicit in the very notion of remains— that exceeds the restrictive enclosure of melancholia as pathology, negativity, or negation. Indeed, the essays in Loss collectively investigate, explore, and identify the various connections and methods by which bodily, spatial, and ideal remains are intimately linked, continuously overlapping and affecting one another. These essays do not simply engage melancholia as a general condition of possibility for subjectivity. Rather, they explore the numerous material practices by which loss is melancholically materialized in the social and the cultural realms and in the political and the aesthetic domains. This anthology suggests that while the twentieth century resounds with catastrophic losses of bodies, spaces, and ideals, psychic and material practices of loss and its remains are productive for history and for politics. Avowals of and attachments to loss can produce a world of remains as a world of new representations and alternative meanings. This collection thus rethinks modern and postmodern understandings of loss as a general and abstract, even metaphysical, condition of being. Offering a counterintuitive apprehension of loss as creative not only encourages us to understand the melancholic ego’s death drive as the precondition for living and for living on. Ultimately, such counterintuitive understandings of loss apprehend the modern and postmodern epoch of loss—characterized by the fragmentation of grand narratives as well as by war, genocide, and neocolonialism—as full of volatile potentiality and future militancies rather than as pathologically bereft and politically reactive, in the style of Benjamin’s acedic historicist. Loss engages Benjamin’s struggle over the stakes of history by marking a field in which the past is brought to bear witness to the present—as a flash of emergence, an instant of emergency, and a moment of production. In this regard, the past remains steadfastly alive for the political work of the present. By resisting the institutionalized violence of what Benjamin calls historicism and by animating the remains of loss as an infinite number of new objects, places, and ideals, Loss opens up the present and orients it

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toward unknown futures. Collectively, the essays in this anthology place less emphasis on what is lost. Instead, they investigate the political, economic, and cultural dimensions of how loss is apprehended and history is named— how that apprehension and naming produce the phenomenon of “what remains.” At the dawn of the twenty-first century, mourning remains. AN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF LOSS

Siegfried Kracauer observes in History: Last Things before the Last that one “may define the area of historical reality, like that of photographic reality, as an anteroom area. Both realities are of a kind which does not lend itself to being dealt with in a definite way.”8 If this anteroom area is characterized by loss, then an intellectual history of loss greets us on the threshold of history’s very possibility, always on the verge of presenting itself. Benjamin, never one to shy away from such elusive encounters, offers a prescription for writing such an intellectual history. “To articulate the past historically,” Benjamin insists, “means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger . . . to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger.”9 As we witness above, Benjamin admonishes the historicist for seeking to grasp and to hold on to the past, to cease its motion and fix a genuine historical image for all eternity. Here, Benjamin calls on us to seize hold of elusive histories that have been obscured by the historicist’s genuine image, not in order to fix those histories and establish new genuine images or new eternal truths, but rather to allow lost pasts to step into the light of a present moment of danger. In this regard, an intellectual history of loss must apprehend itself as an act of provisional writing against the conformism of unwavering historical truths, of histories that claim to blot out the present. Loss engages these historically rich moments of the present, for example, by including three essays on postapartheid South Africa (Sanders, Johnson, Christiansë). We did not anticipate such a critical focus when we began to assemble the collection. Nevertheless, we take the arrival of these three essays as an important opportunity “to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger”—that is, to think from numerous critical perspectives about the remains of bodily, spatial, and ideal losses constituting the future histories of postapartheid South Africa. In this section, we cull a brief but interested intellectual history of loss from three broad periods of Western thought—ancient, late antiquity/ medieval, and Renaissance—and from selected critical engagements with melancholia’s scattered genealogies.10 Following Benjamin’s provocative lead, we bring a particular history of loss to bear on twentieth-century mo-

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ments of danger of which the essays in Loss seize hold. In this regard, we attempt to animate these particular pasts in light of present political concerns. BODILY REMAINS: FLUIDS OF DESPAIR

Classical humoral theory offers a first resonance for our project. The four humors—blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm—were bodily fluids whose qualities and quantities determined both health and disease. Essential to life but also potentially harmful, the humors materially embodied physical as well as temperamental states. At least from the time of Hippocrates (fifth century b.c.e.) and most influentially in the work of Galen (131– 201 c.e.), black bile—known in Greek as mAlaina xolb or melagxol
a and later in Latin as atra bilis or melancholia—was particularly volatile.11 According to Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, black bile characterized “symptoms of mental change, ranging from fear, misanthropy and depression, to madness.”12 Perhaps the most influential ancient account of black bile can be found in the classical text Problemata, attributed to Aristotle. “Why is it,” Problem 30 of this volume asks, “that all men have become outstanding in philosophy, statesmanship, poetry or the arts are melancholic, and some to such an extent that they are infected by the diseases arising from black bile . . . ?”13 The text responds that variations in quantity or quality of this powerful humor have the widest variety of effects: dullness, stupidity, brilliance, eroticism, ecstasy, elation, exaltation, loquaciousness, cowardice, heroism, fear, despondency, and grief.14 To be “outstanding,” however, the quality and quantity of black bile must be balanced, limited, and controlled, neither too hot nor too cold, neither excessive nor lacking: “But those with whom the excessive heat has sunk to a moderate amount are melancholic, though more intelligent and less eccentric, but they are superior to the rest of the world in many ways, some in education, some in the arts and others again in statesmanship.”15 By arguing that black bile materializes bodies in quite particular ways, the Problemata urges us to understand the melancholic body’s relevance not only to philosophy but also to a wide social domain, including politics, poetics, and the arts. It also suggests that black bile is meaningful—it acquires a particular significance from its vast range of potential meanings— only after its relationship to adjustment and control has been determined. That is, while black bile in and of itself is infinitely variable, once it is articulated within specific constraints, it materializes in quite precise ways. To the extent that we take account of embodied losses and lost bodies, then, we might learn from Problem 30 to attend to the ways loss takes effect by materializing as—or as materialized—social constraint.

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Indeed, the role classical humoral theory played in the emergence of the modern, Western category of “race” during the eighteenth century makes such a task ever more urgent. For instance, as eighteenth-century Britons began to produce knowledge about “human variety,” they blended humoral theory and Christian beliefs with new scientific thought about anatomy, blood circulation, the senses, and psychology. This blending resulted in the emergence of a humanist taxonomy around such terms as complexion. The first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1771) draws on such syncretism in its definition of complexion: “Among physicians, the temperament, habitude, and natural disposition of the body, but more often the colour of the face and skin.” Though complexion had long signified human character, or “temperament” and “disposition,” by the end of the eighteenth century the emergent meaning of complexion allowed the notion of character to become more fixed and more locatable on the body’s surface. Thus humoral theory joined with the new Enlightenment sciences to produce a less elastic, more fixed understanding of character as complexion—an understanding that fleshed out the period’s other name for character: “race.” While nineteenth-century scientific movements would interiorize character-as-complexion by locating “race” in bone structure and blood, adding yet another layer to the palimpsest of modern racial thought, the 1771 definition of complexion foregrounds humoral theory’s persistent ability to materialize the social conditions and constraints of racial difference.16 By recalling the ancient art of interpreting the volatile materiality of the body, the persistent notion of black bile focuses our attention on the ways bodies inhabit and are, in turn, inhabited by social constraints.17 That is, insofar as classical humoral theory gives rise to the paradoxical form of an essential element at once creative and constricting, vital and deadly, curative and poisonous, we must consider how the productive constraints of melancholia materialize bodies. This collection asks not only how bodies see and hear losses but also how specific sociohistorical losses see and hear bodies. How are embodied losses registered as historical events—at what costs and for what purposes? How is it that some bodies emerge, appear, and materialize while others remain ghostly, disappear, or fade? What political possibilities do such embodied losses enable or disable? We suggest that this classical trace of melancholia’s corporeal origins calls attention to the twentieth century’s vigorous, often catastrophic, embodiments of loss—over and against intervening splits between mind and body, spirit and matter. All the essays in “Bodily Remains,” part I of this anthology, recall this ancient art of interpreting embodied losses, foregrounding the political stakes of productive constraints. These essays attend to the ways abject and unlivable bodies do not simply lose intelligibility but also continue to be haunted by creative possibilities. Thus, the essays in

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part I take up losses of bodies whose meanings emerge from interpretations of their persistent and volatile material remains: the passing away of Thai revolutionary “Nai Phi” in 1997 (Morris); the 1951 lynching of Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi (Moten); the 1985 execution of Andrew Zondo by South Africa’s apartheid government (Sanders); the turn-of-the-century genocide unleashed by the Ottoman Empire against Armenians (Nichanian, Kazanjian); the unspoken deaths of slavery and racial segregation in the United States (Luciano); the innumerable losses of excoriated young men from the AIDS epidemic of the last two decades (Crimp). Marc Nichanian’s analysis of the Armenian Genocide, “Catastrophic Mourning,” establishes some immediate parameters for thinking about the conditions of (im)possibility for mourning embodied losses. Focusing on the literary work of Zabel Essayan, an early-twentieth-century Armenian author, Nichanian stresses her efforts to grapple with the unnameability of genocide—or what she tends to call aghed, in Armenian, which Nichanian translates into French as la Catastrophe and into English as the Catastrophe. Essayan’s work suggests that, in the face of such a “total” event, one is finally obliged to do something other than chronicle murdered bodies, pain, and death—to do other than prove the historical truth of near-total annihilation. The “totality” of the Armenian aghed cannot be fathomed by such positivist tasks, because, paradoxically, the aghed also produced an interdiction on mourning itself. Such a “total” loss—of bodies, communities, and of what Sophocles called the consummately human practice of mourning itself—fractures all notions of “totality.” Thus, Nichanian observes, “From the beginning . . . Zabel Essayan says the Catastrophe is unrepresentable; but from the beginning, she also gives a precise meaning to this word: it is beyond all representation for an identification.” In this sense, one is obliged to consider not only the legibility and illegibility of the Catastrophe’s bodily remains but also how aghed catastrophically forecloses legibility by barring mourning itself. Nichanian’s subsequent exchange with David Kazanjian further develops the political and philosophical stakes of the distinction between “Genocide” and “Catastrophe.” Coined in the terms of post–World War II international law, the category of genocide for both Nichanian and Kazanjian does violence to the Armenian Catastrophe. By claiming to represent the totality of such an event in positivist terms, the discourse of “Genocide” paradoxically replicates the very calculable logic by which Ottoman authorities organized the deportations and killings of Armenians. In turn, by representing witnessing as proof, the discourse of “Genocide” suppresses the very element of the Catastrophe that Essayan posits as central: its denial of the survivors’ human capacity of mourning. Reading Essayan as a modern Antigone, Nichanian and Kazanjian evaluate the legacy of Essayan’s effort to bear witness to an event that denies the very humanity of the witness. Though Loss

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does not include an essay on what has been perhaps the most persistent touchstone for such political and ethical questions—the Holocaust—the debate within Holocaust studies over the term Shoah resonates with Nichanian and Kazanjian’s discussion of the terms Genocide and Catastrophe. Nichanian and Kazanjian conclude their exchange with a debate about how a new collective politics of mourning might emerge from the Catastrophe. Like other essays in Loss, this exchange extends recent scholarship in trauma studies by insisting that ruptures of experience, witnessing, history, and truth are, indeed, a starting point for political activism and transformation. In this sense, Loss moves from trauma to prophecy, and from epistemological structures of unknowability to the politics of mourning.18 Like Nichanian and Kazanjian, Douglas Crimp explores the limits of mourning in “Melancholia and Moralism.” A companion piece to his influential 1989 essay “Mourning and Militancy,” this essay traces the conservative shift of current, mainstream gay politics toward a new and unrelenting moralism: a shaming of gay men by gay men for “still” seroconverting two decades into the AIDS epidemic. Crimp offers a militant call to think and act against both AIDS and contemporary sexual moralism, particularly gay conservatism. Drawing on his work with the prosex activist group Sex Panic!, Crimp theorizes a politics of the vital that challenges humanist morality and refigures what life might mean in today’s political climate. “If even the educated, rational, and responsible among us can become infected with HIV,” Crimp writes, “if AIDS activists and prevention educators can seroconvert now, then we have to think differently, with still greater complexity and self-understanding, about protection. We have to think about the force of our own unconscious, of our terrible vulnerability, of the fact that we, too, are human.” Crimp concluded his 1989 essay with a call for “mourning and militancy”—a call, that is, to recognize sadness as a militant affect. He concludes this essay with a call to direct militant sadness against contemporary efforts to foreclose mourning: “We can protect against sacrificing our humanity in the very act of struggling to get it recognized or purchasing it at the cost of another’s humanity, which is the perilous ethical cost of accepting the regimes of the normal.” While Crimp explicitly focuses on the interdiction of mourning through questions of sexuality, Nichanian’s reading of Zabel Essayan implicitly considers questions of gender against the figure of a modern-day Antigone. Indeed, the work of mourning bodily remains is often placed on the shoulders of women—mothers, daughters, and sisters—a gendered embodiment of mourning explored throughout the essays in this section. Like Nichanian, Mark Sanders also raises the ghost of Antigone. His essay, “Ambiguities of Mourning,” investigates Lephina Zondo’s testimony before the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) concerning her efforts to recover the body of her son Andrew Zondo, an executed African

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National Congress guerrilla. In the context of the commission’s universal human rights paradigm, Sanders shows how assertions of “custom” by witnesses such as Zondo expose not only a conflation but also a potentially productive disjuncture of law and custom. The British colonial order of indirect rule in Africa systematized and excluded “colonized people from legal and political universality by confining them to a sphere of rule by customary chiefs” and “customary law.” As such, the past reclaimed by invocations of “custom” is “in part a creature of the colonial formation to be superseded.” Yet Sanders also maintains that certain invocations of custom can still bring the colonial artifact of the customary to crisis. Drawing on the ways Antigone’s work of mourning exceeds Hegel’s reconciliation of custom with the law of the state, Sanders suggests that Zondo’s testimony before the TRC evokes a similar practice of “the work of mourning as hearing the other in the law.” For Sanders, “Africa . . . may yet teach Hegel” something, even as Hegelianism directs the TRC’s stated mission to “write the past forever into South Africa’s history.” Dana Luciano’s essay, “Passing Shadows,” also attends to the gendered work of mourning in her reading of Pauline E. Hopkins’s novel Of One Blood (1900). By turning away from realist conventions of the day, Hopkins “narrates the unspoken and as yet unrecognized trauma of historical and racial separation, deploying melancholia as a symptom exposing the abjected underside of American history.” Situated in the midst of the wave of late-nineteenth-century lynching and the growing power of eugenics, Of One Blood confronts the African American body in crisis with a labyrinthine story of ghosts, mesmerism, amnesia, and miscegenation. Melancholia materializes in the form of maternal phantoms that appear throughout the novel as sensationalist and Gothic interventions into realist convention. While Hopkins’s maternal phantom is “illegible to the rational public sphere,” this figure of loss carries “the weight of the melancholic epistemology of the novel: the inability to situate oneself properly in relation to the past when present circumstances conspire to make this impossible.” Ultimately, melancholia becomes a “realistic response” to the multiple crossings of gendered considerations and racial constraints. Both Rosalind Morris’s “Returning the Body without Haunting” and Fred Moten’s “Black Mo’nin’ ” call attention to performances of mourning. Their essays situate mourning as a type of performative that not only exposes the mechanisms of state regulation but also reveals the ways in which state control of bodies materializes a political world of social appropriations. In exploring the 1997 repatriation of the corpse of Nai Phi, the exiled Thai communist revolutionary who eschewed both his proper name (Atsani Phonlacan) and worldly possessions, Morris speaks of the disappearance of social revolution. In all the official stories of Nai Phi’s “belated journey across the Mekong River,” Morris points out, “none neglected reference to

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his homesickness, and all inscribed this return as the actualization rather than the betrayal of a political commitment whose form had, for so long, demanded exile—exile from Thailand and exile from the idea and the values of cultural nationalism.” Morris contends that such narrations are exceptionally common in nationalist contexts, where the return of a lost body to its “native” soil allegorizes nationalism’s aspirations to the kind of absolute return by which a foundationalist identity is produced. That such narrations of cultural nationalism should be more rather than less frequent in the moment of the nation-state’s supposed demise—that this particular narration of Nai Phi’s repatriation appeared at the precise moment in which the “new global economy” of East and Southeast Asia was in ruins— suggests that nationalism itself is a formation produced in the space of ruins, of loss. “Nationalism and globalization,” Morris suggests, “are but two dimensions of a single dialectic, one that is premised upon the refusal of radical difference.” While Morris finds little hope in the state appropriation and staged mourning of Nai Phi’s bodily remains, Moten provides a hopeful counterpoint with a popular appropriation of mourning: the “performance” of Emmett Till’s funeral. Moten considers the famous Jet magazine photograph of Till’s lynched body, made possible by the insistence of his mother, Ms. Bradley, that the body be unretouched and the casket be left open at the funeral. Urging that we listen to the visual staging of Till’s death—to the sounds of moaning embedded in a sight from which our eyes want to turn—Moten draws attention to both a visual restaging of death and an aural aesthetic, a mourning as moaning, a phonographic photography. In what could be read as a counterpoint to Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain, Moten hears not a silence in tortured bodies, but rather a “mo(ur)nin(g)” with deep roots in black history and aesthetics, a potential site of resistance to racist authority and national violence.19 In Moten’s text, political imperatives are never disconnected from aesthetic ones, “from a necessary reconstruction of the very aesthetics of photography, of documentary, and, therefore, of truth, revelation, and enlightenment as well as of judgment, taste, and, therefore, the aesthetic itself.” In its account of the performance of Till’s funeral, Moten’s politico-aesthetic interpretation itself performs the art of interpreting the volatile materiality of the body. “Mo(ur)nin(g)” may emerge from the inability to fix our eyes on a photograph, but “this kind of blindness makes music,” Moten speculates, and such music utters this hope: “New word, new world.” IDEAL REMAINS: A FLIGHT BEFORE POSSIBILITY

From late antiquity and the Middle Ages, a different set of resonances emerge to foreground the essays in part III of Loss: “Ideal Remains.” As

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Giorgio Agamben argues, the period saw the Christian Fathers increasingly obsessed with the “noonday demon,” a temptation said to strike religious men each day at the sun’s apogee. This temptation was an affective constellation including tristitia (a grief that can bring both salvation through a hunger for the good and sin through desperation) as well as acedia.20 Tristitia, a Latin transliteration of the Greek a\ khdia (literally, a state of noncaring), was said to have both a good and an evil side. Indeed, it signified “anguished sadness and desperation,” “the vertiginous and frightening withdrawal . . . when faced with the task implied by the place of man before God,” or “flight before the richness of one’s own spiritual possibilities.”21 Those afflicted with the noonday demon were thus placed at the threshold of a radical creation: the unfolding of a world in becoming. By attending not only to tristitia’s liminality between salvation and sin but also to acedia’s blocked potentials, Agamben traces what he calls a medieval apprehension of loss that is less fixed and more open to possibility than Benjamin’s more critical account of acedia. Read through this medieval trace, melancholia paradoxically figures a certain space of delay as well as an anticipation of a place yet to come— what Heidegger might describe through a thematics of care as the appearance of the world. Working against the notion of melancholia as a state of noncaring, this particular conception is not about the foreclosure of the world but rather the potential engagement with the world and its objects. As Agamben elaborates, “We ought to say that melancholia offers the paradox of an intention to mourn that precedes and anticipates the loss of the object.” This prescient melancholia emerges as “the imaginative capacity to make an unobtainable object appear as if lost,” opening “a space for the existence of the unreal”—a politics of ideality.22 Here, apprehensions of and attachments to loss and its phantasms never simply dwell in the past, for the very process of narrativizing loss orients an impulse toward the future. That is, such a process allows remains to apprehend, and to be apprehended by, the future. Those remains, we must emphasize, are not simple reconstructions, as if they were restored ruins installed in a museum as a record of what was. Rather, Agamben’s medieval melancholia materializes the ghostly remains of an unrealized or idealized potential—the unreal image of an unobtainable object that never was and hence was never lost. Indeed, it is precisely by imagining such a space for the remains of the past that those remains can emerge as constricting forces or motivating ideals. Moreover, thought during late antiquity and the Middle Ages was preoccupied with the ambivalent relationship between what we now often dichotomize as inner affect and outer behavior, internal desires and external temptations. For instance, John Cassian (ca. 360–435) writes in De Institutis Coenobiorum that as soon as the noonday demon begins “to obsess the mind

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of some unfortunate one, it insinuates into him a horror of the place he finds himself in, an impatience with his own cell, and a disdain for the brothers who live with him, who now seem to him careless and vulgar.”23 Cassian describes an apparently internal mind that becomes obsessed with an apparently external demon, and yet that obsession is also an effect of a horror and an impatience the demon has instilled into the mind. At the same time, horror and impatience are represented as reactions of the “unfortunate one” to his surroundings. This spatial ambivalence focuses our attention on the flimsy borders separating inside from outside, resisting any immediate or absolute cordoning off of the individual from the collective or the psychic from the social. Establishing a set of idealized coordinates, Cassian’s noonday demon might be said to offer a prosopopeia, or personification, of the self to the self—a prosopopeia not about social being but about a socialized becoming.24 The essays in “Ideal Remains” all invoke the blocked potentials of such an ideal, anticipatory, and prescient space of socialized becoming. On one hand, these essays suggest that, when unattained ideals emerge as always already lost, political work can lose track of possibilities, trapping ideals in a desperate attempt to restore the ruins of an imagined past. On the other hand, each essay also works to wrest ideals from restrictive interpretative enclosures—such as dichotomies between “inner” and “outer” worlds—in order to unblock their political and social potentials and to create an openness to the world in the interest of imagining alternative strategies of becoming. Examining ideals of gender, for instance, Alys Eve Weinbaum focuses in “Ways of Not Seeing” on the production of modernity not only as visually destabilizing but also as a principal index of gender identity. Weinbaum argues that a closely knit, textual constellation—including the work of Baudelaire, Benjamin, and Freud, as well as that of Constantin Guys and E. T. A. Hoffmann—does not simply record the impact of the rise of the modern metropolis on individual subjects within European modernity. Rather, it produces modernity as a series of shocks bombarding modern male subjects, who absorb and, in turn, reproject these shocks as an aestheticized femininity. Modernity’s shocking transformations precipitate a loss of visual control that is rendered manageable, even pleasurable, through its metonymic association with the idealized figure of woman. Weinbaum thus contends that the male gaze is a historically specific and affectively invested construct rather than “a transhistorical and universal psychic truth,” and is “best characterized not so much by control, mastery, or prowess as by the momentary loss of all three.” In “Passing Away,” Yvette Christiansë, like Sanders, focuses on South Africa’s postapartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Investigating the TRC’s work of mourning “the passing of racialism,” Christiansë iden-

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tifies the cinders of racialism’s persistent remains as the ambivalent figure for a host of as-yet-unmourned individual and collective losses. For instance, Christiansë considers the life of a woman named Poppie, who set out to lose herself in South Africa’s racial taxonomies by passing from “Coloured” to the “play-white” world of a working-class neighborhood. Poppie’s life-long pursuit of such a loss emerges as an effort to pass that, though not overtly subversive, might speak to a militancy of the future, if we can learn how to listen to her: “That is to say, those losses that could not be construed as political, that were not the direct effect of the state’s activities, even if they were indirectly determined or marked by them, are now under threat of remaining unarticulated.” Though Poppie had “not passed to challenge racism,” she “had passed to escape the shame of finding herself as it saw her.” Already rendered invisible under apartheid, Poppie’s passing is thus doubly ghosted in the postapartheid discourse of the TRC. Christiansë invokes ideal potentials blocked by the TRC, which can hear the “agents of apartheid’s violence [take] up the language of victimization . . . in order to establish their claims,” but which cannot make a conceptual space for the complexity of Poppie passing militancy by. Turning to what for some is the politically reprehensible act of passing, Christiansë makes room for Poppie’s silence, her silent passing, and her passing on. In addition, Ann Cvetkovich, as well as David L. Eng and Shinhee Han, explores blocked potentials in the name of future militancies. Taking up Douglas Crimp’s influential challenge to HIV/AIDS activists for “mourning and militancy,” Cvetkovich renders the politics of affective life, reading an archive of emotions resulting from ungrievable losses as a new form of historiography, political activism, and identity politics.25 In “Legacies of Trauma, Legacies of Activism,” Cvetkovich offers an alternative history of the AIDS movement by constructing and interpreting an archive of interviews with lesbian activists who worked with ACT UP/New York during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Cvetkovich attends both to the ways activism “can itself be traumatic because of its emotional intensities and disappointments” and to the ways enduring attachments to the remains of such emotional intensities and disappointments can generate affective bonds and social communities for continuing political work. Only with a fuller sense of the affective life of politics, Cvetkovich maintains, “can we avoid too easy assertions of a ‘political’ solution to the affective consequences of trauma.” Mobilizing these interviews to create not just a political but an emotional history capturing activism’s felt and traumatic dimensions, Cvetkovich writes, “In forging a collective knowledge built on memory, I hope to produce not only a version of history but also an archive of emotions, which is one of trauma’s most important, but most difficult to preserve, legacies.” Rethinking the question of national belonging in terms of an affective history, Eng and Han’s essay, “A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia,” focuses

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on the issue of “psychic citizenship” by reading U.S. histories of anti-Asian racism and exclusion with contemporary case histories of Asian American students who sought therapy for depression. Eng and Han investigate the manifold ways lost ideals of whiteness and Asianness haunt Asian American subjects by producing them as debased, racialized objects. Racial melancholia, they observe, “delineates an unresolved process that might usefully describe the unstable immigration and suspended assimilation of Asian Americans into the national fabric.” Yet Eng and Han also attend to the ways Asian Americans actively enter into conflict with ideals of whiteness and Asianness through mimicry, ambivalence, rage, sacrifice, loss, reinstatement, and even, catastrophically, suicide. In refusing to let go of its lost objects, they assert, racial melancholia delineates one process of “revolt” in which socially disparaged others live on in the psychic realm. As an emotional continuum stretching across the terrain of mourning and melancholia, racial melancholia indexes the ego’s militant refusal to allow certain objects to disappear into oblivion. In this manner, they note along with Freud, “love escapes extinction,” and affective legacies of loss are mobilized for flashes of political hope. The refusal to honor normative distinctions between mourning and melancholia and between loss and activism recalls the unrealized potentials of the noonday demon. It offers mourning and melancholia and militancy for losses not confined to autonomous individuals or delimited social spaces. In her reading of Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, “All Things Shining,” Kaja Silverman also challenges such normative distinctions, taking us deeply into the melancholic abyss of World War II in order to return us emphatically to the world. To watch The Thin Red Line, Silverman writes, “is to be permeated to one’s psychic core by an almost unbearable negativity. It is to live it, breathe it, drink it.” However, by the end of Malick’s film, we learn the crucial lesson that “the only way to reach the light is to plunge yet deeper into the forest.” Reading The Thin Red Line phenomenologically, Silverman urges us to interpret Malick’s film about the Battle of Guadalcanal as one whose “concern is finally not with morality but rather with mortality.” Examining the manifold ways in which phenomenal forms provide the frame through which, in Heidegger’s term, “Being-toward-death” is affirmed, she traces each character’s resistance to confronting the void of nonbeing. In turn, she explores idealized visions of transcendence to which each character attaches himself—U.S. nationalism, paternal masculinism, abjection of the Japanese, love, and ethnographic fantasy. Silverman brings us and the film through these resistances—by traversing the deepest terrain of loss—to a “shining” affirmation of Being. Tackling the possibilities of political futures, Wendy Brown brings Loss to a close with an urgent analysis of political acedia, in the Benjaminian sense, and the future of Left politics. In “Resisting Left Melancholia,”

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Brown renders a Benjamin for the future by presenting today’s Left with Benjamin’s critique of “Left Melancholia.” For Benjamin, Brown writes, “Left Melancholia” represents an “unambivalent epithet for the revolutionary hack who is, finally, more attached to a particular political analysis or ideal—even to the failure of that ideal—than to seizing possibilities for radical change in the present.” Brown thus locates the “unaccountable loss” or “unavowably crushed ideal” that has led segments of today’s U.S. Left to convert the open-ended unpredictability of leftist politics and commitments into an unwavering attachment to frozen ideals that “would supply its adherents a clear and certain path toward the good, the right, and the true.” To keep such a loss unavowed, this Left righteously persists in debasing the identitarian politics and poststructuralist philosophies of the past quarter century, refusing “to apprehend the character of the age and to develop a political critique and a moral-political vision appropriate to this character.” To break from this intellectual straitjacket, Brown calls for a critical and visionary turn toward these debased others to plumb them for their potentials. A “spirit that embraces the notion of a deep and indeed unsettling transformation of society rather than recoiling at this prospect,” Brown concludes, “must become wise to the fact that neither total revolution nor the automatic progress of history would carry us toward whatever reformulated vision we might develop.” SPATIAL REMAINS: THE SPECIAL TRUTH OF GENIUS

The Renaissance gives us a third burst of generative thought about loss, one marked most clearly by the rise to prominence of Aristotle’s Problem 30, discussed above. Figures such as Marsilio Ficino and Robert Burton saw in Aristotle’s account of melancholia the valorization of a special truth in sadness.26 Individuated under the sign of “genius,” this special truth asserted an understanding of melancholia less as the wretchedness of despair and disease than as an imaginative form generated by subjective apprehensions of and attachments to loss.27 A crucial aspect of this form was the emergence of a new aptitude for spatial thought, an aptitude Descartes would exploit to produce the cogito. A subject of representation—a subject, that is, who represents the self to itself first by mastering body and mind and then by mastering the external world—the cogito focuses our attention on mappings that produce the world as knowable and thus conquerable. This spatial aptitude provides the critical approach to part II of Loss, “Spatial Remains.” Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl have shown that during the Middle Ages skill in mathematics came to be connected with humoral melancholia, since mathematics itself was associated with the melancholic’s strongest faculty: imagination. For instance, in the thirteenth century Henricus de Gandavo

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distinguished between metaphysical reasoning and imaginative reasoning, endowing the former with the ability to speculate abstractly outside the limitations of space and time and configuring the latter as the melancholic inability to do so. Trapped within the spatial and temporal dictates of imagination, Gandavo observes, the melancholic’s thoughts “must have extension or, as the geometrical point, occupy a position in space. For this reason such people are melancholy, and are the best mathematicians, but the worst metaphysicians; for they cannot raise their minds above the spatial notions on which mathematics is based.”28 Yet, Gandavo’s passage paradoxically fails to escape the spatial even as it celebrates a nonspatial metaphysics—“raise their minds above the spatial notions”—suggesting that this melancholic aptitude is not so easily dismissed. Indeed, Gandavo’s reliance on the power of spatial thought to propel him toward metaphysical freedom is prescient. In the Renaissance, the spatial imagination of the melancholic ceased to be a limitation. On the contrary, it evolved into a powerful science capable of differentiating an inner world from an outer world and, ultimately, of mastering both domains. When Albrecht Dürer engraved Melencolia I (1517) during the Renaissance, this philosophical transformation of the spatial had already begun. Dürer’s engraving has become one of the most famous Western images of melancholia, partly because it drew together manifold traditions of thought in a synthetic allegory. One of those traditions is represented in the engraving at the foot of Melencolia by a compass and a sphere, figures for geometry, the science of space. For Dürer, this science bespoke not a limit of the imagination but a powerful force: “When you have learnt to measure well . . . it is not necessary always to measure everything, for your acquired art will have trained your eye to measure accurately, and your practiced hand will obey you. Thus the power of art will drive error from your work and prevent you from making a mistake.”29 With the phrase “your acquired art will have trained your eye,” Dürer’s “power” paradoxically acquires the artist as it is acquired by the artist. Subjected to spatial thought, as if it were still a humoral imbalance or an acedic temptation, the artist’s melancholic vision is crafted into the individuated locus of a powerful genius. As such, we might describe the Renaissance subject as one whose aptitude for measuring space yields dominion and authority over the world around him. In the seventeenth century, René Descartes systematized and generalized Dürer’s visionary subject, insisting that this spatial truth of genius was not limited to scholars and artists. In the Discourse on Method (1637), Descartes argued that the classical Archimedean Point (that point outside the earth to which one could apply a lever and move the earth) was nascent inside every subject’s mind as a mental operation applied to the world in order to govern it.30 By withdrawing from the world and practicing a mode of individuated thinking modeled on analytic geometry, the subject gains

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control over himself and the space around him, initiating his pursuit of truth. The Cartesian deployment of melancholia’s analytic geometry greatly influenced the growth of practical sciences such as cartography, astronomy, and navigation. When these practical sciences were put to work for the vast enterprise of European colonization, they were certainly following a principal dictate of Cartesian thought: that the external world is not in itself objective, but rather its objectivity flows from our masterful imposition of objectivity upon the world around us. Yet Descartes’s development of Dürer’s melancholic, visionary subject indexed to space is not exhausted by this individuated authority and its colonial legacy.31 Indeed, we can find in Dürer and Descartes not only subjects mastering the spaces they occupy but also those spaces mastering and configuring subjects themselves. As we have already seen, Dürer vacillated when he tried to account for the source of his special, spatial genius: “your acquired art will have trained your eye.” Descartes’s generalized, spatial truth echoes this ambivalent recursivity of a power that at once acquires the artist and is acquired by the artist. In the first of his Meditations, Descartes asks, How could I deny that these hands and this body are mine, were it not perhaps that I compare myself to certain persons, devoid of sense, whose cerebella are so troubled and clouded by the violent vapours of black bile that they constantly assure us that they think they are kings when they are really quite poor, or that they are clothed in purple when they are really without covering, or who imagine that they have an earthenware head or are nothing but pumpkins or are made of glass . . . ?32

Apparently differentiating the sanity of the cogito from the insanity of a melancholia verging on psychosis, this passage also defers the volatility of spatial thought. Invoked as the other of the cogito’s sanity, melancholic madness consequently becomes essential to the cogito’s coherence. Indeed, Descartes eventually places this volatility within the assurance of the cogito. Descartes writes in the Meditations, if the imagination of painters is extravagant enough to invent something so novel that nothing similar has ever before been seen, and that their work represents a thing purely fictitious and absolutely false, it is certain all the same that the colours of which this is composed are necessarily real. . . . That is possibly why . . . Arithmetic, Geometry and other sciences of that kind which only treat of things that are very simple and very general, without taking great trouble to ascertain whether they are actually existent or not, contain some measure of certainty and an element of the indubitable.33

Here, the cogito contains within itself excessive, fantastic, melancholic images that are nonetheless true. This spatial imagination, not always anchored in “actual existence,” possesses “some measure of certainty and an

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element of the indubitable.” As such, perhaps we can hear in Descartes the ambivalence of Dürer’s subject who acquires a power that also acquires him. If the individuated cogito and its colonial legacy of mastered space must continually accommodate and defer the melancholic and imaginary excesses upon which they are founded, might we draw on those excesses to challenge that legacy?34 The essays in “Spatial Remains” all investigate this intersection of subjectivity and space, questioning the politics and aesthetics of territorialization. How do twentieth-century decolonizations and national reunifications extend or challenge colonial legacies? Might we read in spatial apprehensions of loss as well as apprehensions of lost spaces a resistance to or disruption of the Cartesian mastery of self and other? Both Charity Scribner and Susette Min evaluate contemporary spatial apprehensions of the loss of home and nation in art installations and theater. In turn, David Lloyd, Vilashini Cooppan, and David Johnson consider the possibilities and impossibilities of social, legal, and literary efforts to reclaim the loss of a (de)colonized homeland. In “Left Melancholy,” Charity Scribner examines German artistic attempts to apprehend the reunification of East and West Germany and to evaluate the passing away of an East German communist utopia that never really was. Comparing Joseph Beuys’s installation Economic Values, curator Andreas Ludwig’s Open Museum project, and Judith Kuckart’s play Melancholie I, oder Die zwei Schwestern (Melancholia I, or The Two Sisters), Scribner creates a comparative framework for evaluating loss, ranging from a nostalgia bent on fixity to a melancholia animated by “tender rejection.” Beuys’s preciously curated museum installation of quotidian products of German Democratic Republic state industries decontextualizes these products as “false souvenirs.” It excludes any products “that evidenced the traces of sophisticated Western marketing strategies,” and then preserves the products when they begin to disintegrate by “replac[ing] the perishing edibles with more durable mixtures of sand and chalk powder.” This combination of selective decontextualization and desperate preservation folds these “false souvenirs” into the type of nostalgic longing for the relics of the East—an “Ostalgie”—of which Benjamin would surely be critical. Originally from West Germany, Beuys affixes himself to these lost objects all the more, “investing himself into the project of making the loss his own.” In contrast, Ludwig’s ongoing collection of the same type of objects accepts whatever the populace will deposit, records oral histories of each object from its owners, and lets the objects disintegrate on site. Ludwig thus assembles not only a set of material artifacts but also a living archive of memories and emotions. While Beuys “stills” memory, Ludwig “sets it in motion, carefully.” Kuckart’s play, in turn, fuses surrealism with communism by bringing the past to the present. That is, in transporting the dead com-

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munist revolutionary Mayakovsky into the present for contemporary concerns, Kuckart depicts what is diminished by grand narratives of transformations and historical reunifications. Like Scribner, Susette Min’s “Remains to Be Seen: Reading the Works of Dean Sameshima and Khanh Vo” also shows how spatializing loss does not have to become a nostalgic effort to recuperate lost objects and places. In Between Days (Without You) (1998)—Sameshima’s fifteen eight-by-ten photographs taken in underground gay sex clubs—depicts a series of empty twin beds, each lit and colored differently. Min argues that the series resists reducing these images to a postcardlike nostalgia of past excitements. Instead, it lures the viewer into an anticipatory fantasy suspended between past (has been) and future (will have been). This erotic spatialization and temporalization of loss thus transforms nostalgic stasis into a performative fantasy for the future. Extending this notion of melancholia as becoming, Vo’s site-specific installation, April 25, 1975 (resonance) (1995), fills a gallery space with found objects placed on a flooring of cardboard and drywall, with the objects and the flooring all tightly covered in brown packing tape. The viewer is thus led through a space that invokes “a riverbed arrested in motion or the aftermath of a nuclear meltdown.” This ambivalent landscape of movement and stasis figures loss as an interspace between the disintegration and the becoming of Vo’s found objects. Suggesting unwrapping, disclosure, and resignification, the installation remembers Vietnam (its title representing the date Vo departed Vietnam) and its refugees, who, like Vo, emerged from the violence of U.S. imperialism. Yet the installation refuses to purge that history of ambivalence, letting meaning emerge from the relationship between individual viewers and their particular apprehensions of these liminal, wrapped forms. Both artists thus complicate the narrative of melancholia as absolute loss, opening a space of social reinvestment and entry into a world of objects that are becoming “something new, something different.” David Lloyd’s essay, “The Memory of Hunger,” hears in the landscape of Irish cultural production—particularly in the mourning ritual of keening during and after the Famine—both British colonial mastery of and loss of control over a colonized space. Lloyd writes that in “account after account of the Famine, the terrible silence of the land is time and again counterpointed by the sound of wailing or howling, as if indifferently human or animal. The silence is at once the silence of depopulation and the silence of traumatized culture; the wail . . . marks simultaneously the dissolution of the Irish as subjects of their own culture and history and the historical emergence of a new kind of Irish subject.” Keening as an emotional response to famine—a famine not the result of natural disaster but the outcome of a British colonial policy evacuating the land of its productive value—indexes the disastrous loss of lives as starvation and emigration intensified. In its

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melancholic acoustic excess, keening contests the colonial claim that the Irish brought the catastrophe of famine upon themselves through their premodern ways. Like Moten’s “mo(ur)nin(g),” Lloyd’s keening hears political possibilities in the catastrophic pain of stricken bodies. Vilashini Cooppan’s “Mourning Becomes Kitsch” also looks to an alternative aesthetics of lost space. Cooppan reads the experimental novel Cobra by Cuban expatriate Severo Sarduy for an antifoundationalist representation of Cuban national identity. Written during Sarduy’s self-imposed exile in Paris, the novel revels in an irreverent nostalgia for a lost national identity it ecstatically fabricates. Sarduy’s distinctly postmodern nostalgia for home offers a counterpoint to the more canonical texts of postcolonial Cuba, those of Fernández Retamar and Jose Martí. Cobra rejects any kind of foundational discourse and offers “a dizzying array of proliferating, mutating, visibly constructed identities.” In particular, Sarduy privileges an aesthetics of anamorphosis—a Lacanian refiguring of meaning as never apprehended head-on, but rather through spatial displacement.35 Sarduy’s exilic loss is thus converted by Cobra’s vertiginous plotting of “Cuban drag queens, itinerant Tibetan monks, [and] false Indian gurus” into “a precarious politics of cultural representation that does not seek to restore loss so much as to turn loss into a particular kind of aesthetic, in which artifice triumphs over authenticity.” This antifoundationalist reading challenges traditional accounts of the emergence of a postcolonial subjectivity built on the foundation of authenticity and the recuperation of a lost national purity. David Johnson’s “Theorizing the Loss of Land,” the third of our essays on South Africa, examines Griqua claims before the Land Commission of South Africa, an administrative body charged with adjudicating apartheid’s legacy of land grabs. Johnson’s cautionary essay asks why the Land Commission is comparatively undervalued internationally (in relation to the more well-known Truth and Reconciliation Commission) and underachieving domestically. He argues that these land claims are highly illegible within current Western discourses on loss and universal human rights, particularly as configured by the Land Commission’s liberal, historico-juridical discourses. While Marx’s attention to private property’s historical and cultural specificity might challenge the Land Commission’s insistence that all claims begin and end in private property, the liberal framework of the commission bars the Griqua suit from that challenge. Similarly, Johnson suggests that Freud’s account of melancholia raises a key question about the Griqua suit: “Is it possible to mourn something that you want back?” Yet the suppression of and refusal to acknowledge affect in colonial land policy prevents the commission from hearing the claims of this discourse as well. Showing a keen attention to the constitutive relationships among contextual, material, and affective spaces, Johnson concludes that “theories of loss emerge in tension with their context(s), and to suppress those context(s) is to privi-

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lege theory at the expense of history and politics. By the uncomfortable juxtaposition of theory and a range of competing discourses—legal, political, historical—Johnson resists and complicates “the assimilation of South African histories and struggles to the cadences of Western, or in this case North American, theoretical trajectories.” Like hysteria at the turn of the last century, melancholia at the turn of this century has emerged as a crucial touchstone for social and subjective formations, as the essays in Loss illustrate. Even further, these essays eclipse conventional understandings of melancholia as pathological and negative by considering the ways in which loss and its remains are insistently creative and deeply political. In “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud observes that those who suffer from melancholia have a “keener eye for the truth than other people who are not melancholic . . . we only wonder why a man has to be ill before he can be accessible to a truth of this kind.”36 In the spirit of Freud’s wonder, the essays in Loss engage the keen complexity of a truth of this kind. NOTES

The epigraph is from Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 256. We have modified the translation of the third sentence, substituting “that method” for “it,” to follow the German more closely and to clarify the meaning. Jacques Derrida’s work on mourning inspires our attention to remains. See, especially, Cinders, trans. Ned Lukacher (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991). For their insightful feedback on this introduction, we thank Emma Bianchi, Miranda Joseph, Steve Kruger, Margaret Pappano, María Josefina Saldaña, and Deborah White. 1. Defining his notion of theoretical fiction, Freud writes, “When I described one of the psychical processes as occurring in the mental apparatus as the ‘primary’ one, what I had in mind was not merely considerations of relative importance and efficiency; I intended also to choose a name which would give an indication of its chronological priority. It is true that, so far as we know, no psychical apparatus exists which possesses a primary process only and that such an apparatus is to that extent a theoretical fiction” (Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey [New York: Avon Books, 1965], 642–43). 2. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), 243. 3. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 244. 4. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 256. 5. Sigmund Freud, “The Ego and the Id,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 19, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 1–59. 6. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 170.

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7. Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 20. 8. Siegfried Kracauer, History: Last Things before the Last (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 191. 9. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 255. 10. For more traditional intellectual histories that focus on the figure of melancholia, see Lawrence Babb, The Elizabethan Malady: A Study of Melancholia in English Literature from 1580–1642 (East Lansing: Michigan State College Press, 1951); Stanley W. Jackson, Melancholia and Depression: From Hippocratic Times to Modern Times (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1964); Rudolf Wittkower and Margot Wittkower, Born under Saturn: The Character and Conduct of Artists, a Documented History from Antiquity to the French Revolution (New York: Random House, 1963). 11. For an early articulation, see Hippocrates, “Of the Nature of Man,” in Hippocrates IV, trans. W. H. S. Jones (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 1–41. 12. Klibansky et al., Saturn and Melancholy, 14. 13. Aristotle, Problems, Books XXII–XXXVIII, trans. W. S. Hett (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 155. 14. Aristotle, Problems, 157. 15. Aristotle, Problems, 163. 16. Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in EighteenthCentury British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 26. See also Mary Floyd-Wilson, “‘Clime, Complexion, and Degree’: Racialism in Early Modern England,” Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, 1996. 17. For an elaboration of the materiality of productive constraints, see Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993). 18. On recent debates about Shoah, see Georgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999). On trauma studies, see Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), as well as Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). 19. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 20. For an account of the many affects in this constellation, see Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Ronald L. Martinez (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 3–7. For a more extensive account of the relationship between tristitia and acedia, see Morton W. Bloomfield, The Seven Deadly Sins (East Lansing: Michigan State College Press, 1952). 21. Agamben, Stanzas, 5–6. 22. Agamben, Stanzas, 20. 23. John Cassian, De Institutis Coenobiorum, book 10, chapter 2; cited in Agamben, Stanzas, 4.

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24. On the rhetoric of prosopopoeia, see Jacques Derrida, Memoirs for Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). 25. See Douglas Crimp, “Mourning and Militancy,” October 51 (winter 1989): 3– 18. 26. See Marsilio Ficino, Meditations on the Soul: Selected Letters of Marsilio Ficino (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions International, 1996); and Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). 27. To be sure, this figure of the melancholic genius was markedly masculinist. Indeed, Juliana Schiesari has suggested that it began an appropriation of mourning, a culturally productive apprehension of loss traditionally associated with women. See Schiesari’s The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992). 28. Henricus de Gandavo [Henry of Ghent], Quodlibeta, trans. Roland J. Teske (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1993). 29. Quoted in Klibansky et al., Saturn and Melancholy, 341. 30. René Descartes, The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972). 31. For a kindred reading of the geometric figures in Dürer’s Melencolia I, see Agamben, Stanzas, 26. 32. Descartes, The Philosophical Works, 146. 33. Descartes, The Philosophical Works, 146–47. Derrida writes of this passage, “Nothing is less reassuring than the Cogito at its proper and inaugural moment . . . doubt and the Cartesian Cogito are punctuated by this project of a singular and unprecedented excess.” Derrida is contesting Foucault’s reading of Descartes. Whereas for Foucault, Descartes interns madness by insisting, “I who think, I cannot be mad,” for Derrida, Descartes slips past madness as well as all sensory errors and declares, “Whether I am mad or not, Cogito, sum.” See Jacques Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (New York: Routledge, 1978), 55–57; Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage Books, 1988). For Foucault’s response to Derrida, see “My Body, This Paper, This Fire,” Oxford Literary Review 4, no. 1 (1979): 59–76. 34. Lacan’s “The Mirror Stage” offers a rich instance of such a reading. For Lacan, this excess of masterful vision reemerges as the méconnaissance of the infant before the mirror. Leaning toward the looking glass, Lacan’s “jubilant” youngster attempts to capture the image of self at once by mastering its reflection and closing off the space between bodily ego and imago. This psychic dynamic opens upon the terrain of loss: the infant’s jubilant identification with the image of self alternates between aggressive paranoid mastery and a melancholic dejection over the loss of visual and spatial control. See Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 1–7. 35. See Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981). 36. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 246.

i

Bodily Remains

Rosalind C. Morris

Returning the Body without Haunting Mourning “Nai Phi” and the End of Revolution in Thailand In contemporary Thailand it is not a question of exorcising ghosts, but rather, perhaps, of summoning them. benedict anderson, “Radicalism after Communism”

. . . this is not a ghost story. It is a story of a specter, the Specter of Time. wat wanlayangkoon, Duai rak haeng udomkan (With Ideological Love)

It is the custom of police agencies and newspapers to report events in precise units of time and thereby to shore up for the rest of us the impossible sense of time’s and especially the past’s actuality. This is especially true of events that are assigned a prominent place in recollection, which are, indeed, the orienting points of recollection. Such was the case with Atsani Phonlacan, the writer and Marxist-communist revolutionary,1 whose corpse was returned to Thailand, the press reported, on November 29, 1997, at precisely 10:25 a.m. In his return the national media found evidence of an epochal transformation, and in their inscription of that return, they rendered a belated homecoming as the final interment of communism and its particular mode of foreignness. Such a location of the event, which rests on the fact that eventfulness is a function of the rupture of daily flow, also produces the present as an impossible and always already receding point. The present, which the memory theorists of the nineteenth century knew to be an impossibility, therefore acquires its seemingly permanent but relative place through the assignation of time—but only in retrospect, as a trace, as something irrecoverably lost.2 Thus, newspapers give us events in the aftermath of their passing and make of all news an aspiration to the status of obituary. Nowhere is this more apparent than in those stories, so beloved of the contemporary media, that narrate the processes by which a body is recovered, a death reconciled with its corpse, or a burial accomplished long after the fact of mortality. Such narrations are exceptionally common in nationalist contexts, where the 29

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return of a body to its putatively original soil often allegorizes nationalism’s aspiration to that kind of absolute return in which the appearance of identity is produced (and history is evacuated). That such narrations should be more rather than less common in the moment of the nation-state’s demise should perhaps suggest to us that nationalism is itself a formation produced in the space of loss or at least in the space of an anticipated loss. For it is loss that summons the fantasy of return. In this essay, I would like to consider the return of Atsani Phonlacan’s body to Thailand from Laos. I am moved to consider this case both because of what it reveals about the investments in nationalism that continue to dominate the contemporary moment and because Atsani’s case provides such a singular repudiation of the kind of phantasmatically absolute return to which nationalism bids us surrender. Atsani Phonlacan’s life and writings not only resist the seductive promise of a pure origin recoverable from the ruin of globality, but they also suggest an alternative way of thinking the very problematic of memory and, more important, futurity. Before turning to the case of Atsani Phonlacan, however, I want to linger on the topic of return, of memory, and of the possibility of remembering the future. Such issues acquire their force, become capable of bidding our attention, because of the kind of temporal crisis in which we now find ourselves. For, unlike the nineteenth century, ours is a crisis not of the present but of the future and of the possibility of thinking the future at a time when alternative teleologies have themselves become anachronistic. At such times, one is tempted to think that we ought to try to perform the same surgeries as our criminological predecessors did, to find techniques that would permit us to cut out from the retina the vision that last held the consciousness of a man or woman now deceased. This is especially true when the sight is a moral vision. In Thailand, when a crime is committed and a suspect apprehended, the alleged perpetrators are made to pose with the fruits of their crime and, sometimes, to act out the crime itself for the purposes of police documentation. This is the flip side of what Victorian detectives sought in their postmortem excisions, the vision of a crime from the perspective of its victims. But both modes of detection and preservation presume the possibility of getting hold of the present in the future, even if that act of capture takes place after the fact, when the present has itself become the past. The question that remains, then, is, What would it mean to get hold of a vision of the future from those who went before, and to think of it again, in terms of its possible coming into being? I pose this question in general because of its generational significance, and I pose it in reference to Thailand as a means of considering what is, I believe, the most significant loss of our age and of Thailand’s age: namely, the loss of a commitment to revolutionary historical transformation. In its general form, the question is, of course, both familiar and trite. We are all

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now well versed in both the triumphalist and the elegiac versions of the narrative of Marxism’s demise. Whether cast simply as one more metanarrative’s inevitable ruin or as the (approved or disapproved) mark of capitalism’s triumph, whether read as the sign of history’s end or of an infinite unfolding of the same, the “fall of socialism” has been recognized as the incontrovertible truth of the 1990s. In fact, in 1992, when Thai democracy activists were filling the streets with their bodies and demanding the removal of a coup general, Suchinda Khraprayoon, from the illegitimately appropriated office of the prime minister, business editors could chastise the army brass for their ridiculous accusations of communism by quoting Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History.”3 If communism was over, they said, the protestors could not be communist, and there would be no need of violent reprisals. The editors’ exuberant embrace of Fukuyama’s conservative text had its ironically progressive effects. It helped to ensure the relative containment of state violence, although the calls for civility were, in the end, prompted more by a desire for market stability than by any genuine sympathy for protestors. But they were certainly not alone in their acquiescence to the rightist reading of historical events. Very few people then felt it necessary to argue Fukuyama’s claims, and many scholars in the U.S. academy now assume what neoliberalism has sought long and hard to effect: namely, the disappearance of the question of the future.4 Revolution, where it appears—and in newly “democratizing” contexts, it exists now mainly as a mode of appearance, as a mise-en-scène for the foreign viewer—is now but a symptom of the reconciliation of times, of the racination of the prehistories posited by capital. It has become a word designating the absolute nullification of the past, and, under its banner, places that were previously imagined to be split in and by history (places that were said to be inhabited by, for example, both the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries) or by different economic regimes (such as feudalism and capitalism) achieve the putative homogeneity of the modern.5 This homogeneity has the name of bourgeois democracy, of course. It is the space of infinite interchangeability: of substitutable commodities, laborers, and even localities. And although these substitutions rest on the presumption of a value that will be produced in time, through the processes of circulation and inflation, they take space in a phantasmatic place of eternal presence. The past, one might say, is everywhere being put to rest, is being exorcised of its capacity to haunt, to escape its pastness. This is particularly true where the specter of communism once threatened or achieved a material incarnation. Thus, in the post-Soviet world, in parts of Southeast Asia, even in China, one senses an abandonment of the material past, even as such abandonment demands the ironic embrace of origins—usually under the aegis of ethno- or cultural nationalism.

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The vision of a future, seen from the past, is, of course, inaccessible. Indeed, the fantasy of a return to the past is, essentially, a fantasy of being in the place of one who has died, one who no longer responds to his proper name. Freud would perhaps have written this fantasy under the category of pathology, seen it as a narcissistic mode of identification, and read its traces in terms of the symptomatology of “melancholia.”6 But I am proposing something else here, a different kind of mourning and grieving, in which the gesture of retrojection is recognized for what it is, and the difference of the past is insisted upon. That is to say, I am not advocating a belief in actual substitution, in our actually being able to achieve the perspective of the past. We can, after all, imagine making this gesture of retrojection only because we have survived—with the name and with words “treated as names”—and because we know we have survived the death of one who could previously “answer to or answer in and for his name.”7 Rather than entertaining anything like identification with the dead, however, I mean to use this occasion to ask how we might begin thinking about our present condition as one in which we no longer treat memory as a reflection on the past, but rather as an engagement of the future.8 Such questions—of how to survive with the names of the dead and how to see the future from the perspective of the one who has gone before—become peculiarly compelling when one considers the life and the death of those whose legacies are secreted in pseudonyms and code names, as in the case of Atsani Phonlacan. For the code name enacts that survival of the corpse by its sign, which is necessary for memorialization. More commonly known in Thailand by one of his pseudonyms, “Nai Phi” (meaning “master of spirits”), Atsani Phonlacan is a name whose sound is virtually unknown to Western readers and historians of Marxist literature, mainly because his works have remained untranslated into English. A poet, short-story writer, lyricist, literary scholar, critical theorist, revolutionary, Atsani Phonlacan’s biography is virtually coextensive with the history of revolutionary aspiration in Thailand.9 Increasingly, however, his name is forgotten in Thailand as well. For a generation of youths for whom the communist movement has been represented (in schools and official discourse) as a foreign barbarism, his name provokes no echoes, is unknown, unheard, inaudible. When, in 1997, his wife was finally permitted to claim the remnants of his body, newspaper pundits used the occasion to flatter themselves about a newfound tolerance in Thailand. Atsani was returned and interred in the crypt of a nation that now rested sure in the knowledge of communism’s death. But instead of offering him a “rite of burning,” as is the custom in Thailand, they made him representative of nationalism’s bitter and oddly belated triumph. In a word, they interred him. However, Atsani’s bones, now white and rattling, mark the place where a question becomes necessary. His ghost, the ghost named Nai Phi, the

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ghost that cultural nationalism in the age of neoliberalism wants to have vanquished, asks us directly: What is lost of the future in the demand for absolute returns? I echo the question as a kind of mémoire—although, in truth, it must perform the work of a mémoire in the absence of any personal knowledge. To say that I did not know Nai Phi (which is true) is not, however, to say that Nai Phi was in any way knowable—though he was more known by his comrades than by others. Nai Phi was a code name for a man, Atsani Phonlacan, and as such, as a code name, Nai Phi marks the place of a proper name’s disappearance. It marks, further, the point of an individual’s encompassment by generality, the point of his becoming anonymous—in history and in the anticipation of a future death. In fact, Atsani had numerous code names and wrote (poems, tracts, essays, and works on both literary form and revolutionary poetics) under several of them. The disjuncture between his proper name and his code name merely performed the inevitable separation of an individual life from its future recall. As Derrida reminds us, the disjuncture between the name and the thing named contains within itself the very possibility of the thing’s memorialization through its name. The name persists (it can be recalled) when the corporeal body has vanished. Nai Phi’s assumption of code names effected his absorption by the general and generalizing discourses of Marxism-communism and made his particular refusal to end exile a matter of philosophical as well as political significance. One could say, indeed, that in taking on code names, Atsani Phonlacan committed himself to the death, to the martyrdom, but also to the future recollection that communism asked of him even before his death. I will have more to say about this, about the relationships among names, martyrdom, and the particular abstract deaths (deaths by abstraction) demanded by communist and other revolutionary ideologies, in the pages that follow. For now, I want to consider the moment of Atsani’s return and to seek an understanding of that moment in terms of the demand that has since been made of that journey back, namely, the demand that it signify the absolute return to both the nation and the particular cultural nationalism of the modern Thai state. A TIME OF EXILE

November 29, 1997. 10:25 a.m. Although it culminated more than a decade of labors on the part of surviving family and friends, Nai Phi’s return is said to have been accomplished at precisely this moment. Its precise registration in local newspapers constitutes but one of many efforts at mastery on the part of the Thai state (and its media), a last attempt to contain the significations and the figurations of possible futures that emanated

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from and circulated around Nai Phi. For Nai Phi was the second son of communist martyrdom and the most visible remaining exile from Thailand’s insurgency. Ten years after his death by cancer in Laos, and twentyone years after the bloody repression of student activists at Thammasat University, his remains and twenty-four items of personal belongings were carried across the Mekong River to be interred by his surviving wife and friends. Newspapers around Thailand would remark the occasion as the realization of a yearning that had possessed Nai Phi even in the face of his refusal to surrender himself and the idea of revolutionary transformation. Amid a flurry of memorial publications and commemorative gestures devoted both to the successes of the democratic government that had come briefly to power in 1973 and to the victims of military restoration in 1976, Nai Phi’s return to Thailand seemed, on the surface, to instantiate the very principle of national reconciliation. For years, the requests to have Atsani’s body returned had been rejected by the military and by the national governments of both rightist and centrist persuasions. It was only (and ironically) as a result of efforts by then prime minister General Chawalit Yongchaiyudh that the values of localism defeated those of a more universalist national politics. Despite his previous espousal of conservatively militarist politics and his involvement in the violent suppression of communist activities, General Chawalit’s ties to Atsani’s home region, Isaan, are said to have facilitated the negotiation of an agreement that would permit the return of Nai Phi in the mode of a homecoming. And, indeed, the majority of news stories about Atsani’s return have figured it as precisely such a homecoming, as the final end to the exile of homesickness. For some, the return and interment of Nai Phi—the liberation and quieting of his spirit—had occurred much earlier and had been signaled by the enormous popularity of a song, “Duan pen” (Full Moon), that was based on his elegiac poem, “Kidtheung baan” (Missing Home). For others, the very transposition of his poetry into the domain of mass culture constituted a domestication of the worst kind. Still others saw the circulation of those lyrics in a context that had banned and virtually annihilated communism as an unbearable irony, one in which Nai Phi’s seeming presence could only underscore his actual absence and the failure of revolution in Thailand. Second to Jit Poumisak, the more widely read and translated author of Thai Radical Discourse: The Real Face of Thai Feudalism Today,10 Nai Phi had, in fact, been the most visible icon of a residual refusal to give up communism for the voluptuous embrace of a militarized national unity. His poems, many of which were written in a complex hybrid of classical verse forms called kaap khlon, had appeared in newspapers and journals during the middle decades of the century and had enjoyed enormous popularity, earning him the affectionate moniker of “People’s Poet.” Indeed, it was the

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publication of the poetic lament “Isaan” in a 1952 issue of Siam Samai (the Siam Times) that first drew him to Jit’s attention.11 Yet, although he authored more than 350 poems and earned great fame as a prose stylist and translator, Nai Phi’s exile coincided with his eclipse in the cultural imaginary of Thailand’s youth. Both he and his communism are now frequently dismissed with the contempt that accrues to anachronism. Indeed, when, upon retrieving her husband’s body, Wimol Ponlacan draped it with the gold-starred red flag of the disbanded Communist Party of Thailand, a bystander is reported to have said, “Why did she do that? . . . The CPT no longer exists in Thailand. It wasn’t able to solve our problems. What we need now is democracy.”12 It is the history of this eclipse and of Nai Phi’s relationship to the possibility of such eclipse that interests me here. It is, moreover, Nai Phi’s willingness to risk oblivion that makes him the worthy object of mémoire. Notwithstanding the ubiquity of Nai Phi’s poetic compositions and his status as pseudonymous popular rebel hero, Atsani Phonlacan chose not to return to Thailand following the amnesty of 1980, which pardoned members of the Community Party of Thailand if they agreed to surrender themselves and turn over their weapons. Indeed, this refusal marked him as a figure of excess and, occasionally, of traitorousness, for it suggested a lack of devotion to his fans and his country. Quite unequivocally, it refused the sublimation of revolutionary politics in and by the rhetoric of reconciliation. Over time, then, Atsani came to stand for a certain irreducible political alterity. Indeed, his insistent exile haunted the discourses of normalization (figured as stability, or khwaam mankhong) until his death effected what his life could not, namely, the end of haunting. One could say that Atsani’s entire political life was enacted in the mode of exile. Born in 1918 to an extremely wealthy family of noble lineage in Ratchaburi, Atsani was the son of a well-placed bureaucrat in the office of the attorney general. He is nonetheless reputed to have disavowed his privileged childhood and, as young as ten, refused to wear gold jewelry in the face of the poverty that surrounded him. Trained at Bangkok’s most prestigious boy’s school, Suan Kulab Witthayalai, Atsani fell under the influence of the first generation of foreign-trained intellectuals, including those who formed the protosocialist circle of Pridi Phanomyong, known in Thai history as the Promoters. Pridi, who had staged the first coup in Thailand and presided over the end of absolute monarchy, had been quickly deposed, and it was in the wake of his expulsion from the sphere of influence in Bangkok that Atsani began to write radical journalism calling for organized resistance and the pursuit of social justice.13 Writing mainly anonymously, he completed his law degree and assumed a position like his father’s in the office of the attorney general. There he acquired fame as a particularly compassionate man.14

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In Thailand, as elsewhere in the world, these were years of virulent cultural nationalism.15 Not only was adherence to the monarchy and the public display of formalized Thai-ness demanded by law, but local dialects and forms of dress were proscribed, while ethnic minorities, and especially the Chinese, became the objects of vociferous denunciation.16 Initially neutral, Thailand was allied with Japan only to transfer allegiance at war’s end. It is worth noting here that many of the socialists from Pridi’s movement, as well as more conservative and monarchist politicians, were involved in the anti-Japanese underground, called the “Free Thai” movement. Supported by the Allies during the war, this group’s emergence and assumption of power at war’s end helped stave off the postwar ire of the Allies and ensured Thailand’s privileged place as Southeast Asian buffer state against both Soviet- and Chinese-supported communism. Even before the war, much of the cultural policy of the time had been produced in anticipation of Western gazes—as it had been since the middle of the nineteenth century, when King Rama IV (r. 1851–68) began to cultivate Western audiences in the court. Through the legislative regulation and policing of appearances, the government sought to produce that image of civility on whose basis national sovereignty and political neutrality could be defended. Nor was the desire for this civility a minor affair, for it would be recognized by Europe as the mark of civilization. Since Rama IV’s reign, when Siam had been squeezed by both British and French imperial aggression, the defense of national autonomy and the fear of its loss had assumed an especially intense and aggressive character.17 By the early twentieth century, overt military geopolitical pressures had been supplanted by economic ones, but in this context, the rhetoric of culture performed the same role as it did in more directly colonized contexts. It provided the foundation for nationalism. Atsani supported anticolonial movements as a necessary emancipatory moment in the universal struggle for freedom. Nonetheless, he was deeply skeptical of the xenophobia that undergirded Thailand’s own version of “anticolonial” nationalism. Despite his position in the attorney general’s office, he refused to carry out the “Cultural Mandates” (rathaniyom) of Phibulsongkhram’s (prime minister, 1938–44, 1948–57) etiquette-obsessed government and saw the vast attempt to regulate cultural form as little more than the violent effort to establish elite Siamese culture in a hegemonic mode. That sentiment soon became explicit. When Atsani failed to bring charges against Southern Muslims who disobeyed the edict requiring the wearing of hats, he was perceived as inadequately devoted to the monarchy and the nation.18 And this refusal led rather quickly to his fall from favor. A series of transfers followed until his support of socialist electoral candidates and his complaints about official corruption led to an impasse. He resigned his office in 1952, in protest over the arrests of journalists whom the reelected Phi-

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bulsongkhram regime had charged with communism. Shortly thereafter, he went into exile, leaving his wife and children behind. This first exile took Atsani to Beijing, where he met Pridi and studied Marxist philosophy and where he was clearly initiated into the finer points of insurgency. Unlike many of his comrades in the CPT, Atsani managed to evade arrest and imprisonment by moving underground, hiding in the jungle, and making trips to China. His assumption of pseudonyms certainly helped to sustain his invisibility, even though his authorship of political poetry between 1946 and 1952 had made him famous among radicals and their opponents alike. Atsani was, nonetheless, in Thailand in 1958, during which year he returned to Thailand very briefly. Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat came to power, inaugurating what is now thought by many to have been the most despotic period in Thai history. By this time, Thailand had its own version of the Un-American Activities Act and an elaborate apparatus for both interrogating and terrorizing its population.19 It was, in any case, deeply influenced by the United States and would, within the course of the next twenty years, enjoy the status of most favored political ally in the region.20 Communism became punishable by death. And Atsani was forced to leave again. His disappearance from the national space corresponded to his submersion in the sphere of secrecy that the pseudonyms, including not only Nai Phi but also Intarayuth, Praphai Wisetthanii, and Sahaa Fai (Fire), had generated. It is perhaps not surprising that, in the end, it was the name Nai Phi that assumed prominence, and although Atsani’s official code name in the Communist Party would be Sahaai Fai (after 1961), it was “Master of Spirits” who held the public imagination, conjuring as it did the very elusiveness that the pseudonym sought to figure. It was “Master of Spirits,” alluding to a phantom movement across a landscape increasingly read as a space of civil war, that incited fear and provoked fantasies of struggle and of disappearance into “the Struggle.” The choice of the pen name was not merely fortuitous. Nor was it derived from local esoterica associated with ghost practices and spirit possession. Atsani himself insisted on translating the name into English as “specter,” conjuring not only the authority of the dead, and perhaps of death, but also the language of Marx’s Communist Manifesto. According to Kasian Tejapira, the name also intentionally resonated with “A-sani,” one of the many names given to Shiva, the god of death, destruction, and purgation. “By calling himself ‘Naiphi’ [sic], Atsani had cunningly placed the ‘Specter of Communism’ at a central divine position one rung above the Siamese monarchy in the traditional Hindu theological universe, thus promoting a radical alien idea (and his poetic self) with a Thai conservative discourse and radicalizing the latter with the former at one stroke.”21 Like all specters, Nai Phi’s threatened to dissipate into a multiplicity of possible identities. Nor was it known widely at the time that

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the name “Nai Phi” was used by the same person who identified himself as Intarayuth, or any of the other pen names that he, like Jit, used “to escape suppression of [his] works.”22 An aura did cohere, however, and with it the possibility of future recall. The reasons for this are many. But not least of these was that in 1958, the year in which he began his second, and in some degree permanent, exile, a volume of poems, entitled Kaap Khlon Nai Phi (The Kaap Khlon Verse of Nai Phi), was published under that name. Here, for the first time, a body of his literature appeared, a body that was at once the product of a single author, and hence of a single body, and, at the same time, the point of that body’s displacement by a figure. This strange relation was, moreover, doubled in the volume, which made of Nai Phi not only an author but also a narrator, and more, a character. From the very first poem, the volume is haunted by the enigmatic form of the Master of Spirits. His elusive apparition in the opening stanza of the first poem, as well as his subsequent disappearance, then reappearance in the following poem, performs what is a recurrent trope in the volume: namely, that of the trickster at the limits of vision. He is the object of both attraction and disavowal, one whose tongue enchants and speaks the truth, but one who is, in the end, embattled by the gluttony and the dissimulations of a crowd that has not yet converted itself into the mass of revolutionary possibility. WHAT IS IN A NAME?

Nai Phi. The magnificently seductive and seemingly limitless temptation to play on and with this name (which is not one) is, in the end, a function of translation. And this temptation is itself the temptation of a violation, for names are normally that which resist translation, their singularity and their promise of an identity between word and thing is precisely what makes them names and not merely words among others. To make “Nai Phi” signify, to render it as the “Master of Spirits,” is to refuse it the status of the proper name. But it would be wrong to think that this act of translation, with its encrypted belief in the possibility of absolutely transparent meaning, is a feature of the movement between Thai and English. It is also a sui generis feature of the pseudonym or the code name, which wants to be read—within its “own” language—as something other than a proper name. That is to say, the pseudonym and the code name are points at which a certain foreignness enters a language, any language. They are the points at which something singular, a name, becomes translatable, generalizable. This is why one can have many substitutable pseudonyms but not many proper names. This is why Nai Phi could be called Intarayuth or Praphai Wisetthanii or Sahaa Fai. And this is why one can ask about the meaning of Nai Phi in a way one cannot ask about the meaning of Atsani Phonlacan.

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In its ideal form, a proper name can be given a biography but never a history or an etymology. Nai Phi is a “master of spirits,” but Atsani Phonlacan remains the same in every language. Atsani understood this power of the foreign in language. He was a translator of literature from seven different languages, including English, French, Latin, Pali, Sanskrit, Vietnamese, and Chinese.23 Partly, this multilingualism and the associated translational practice was born of the need to “Thai-ify” communist literatures for a Siamese audience. For the first several decades of the twentieth century, much of the labor of intellectuals like Atsani was devoted to the translation of classic Marxist and Leninist texts into Thai, either directly or via commentaries. Later, Thai, U.S., and other anticommunist forces would produce translations as part of a plot to produce their own communist specters and to identify radical elements within Thailand. In a particularly famous case, William Gedney solicited a bright young student named Chit Poumisak to translate the Communist Manifesto but succeeded only in converting his protegé to the cause of radicalism. Throughout the century, however, the question of Thai-ification would plague Siamese radicals. Ultimately, it would demand more than literary solutions, particularly when this meant realigning solidarities after Vietnam invaded Cambodia and the Chinese Communist Party, to which the CPT was subservient, demanded a repudiation of the Vietnamese cause. For Atsani, however, the literary cause was always already a political one. And Thai-ification meant translation. One can surmise that the one who comes to writing literature through translation, like the one who comes to writing through copying, does so in a manner that permits him to escape or to avoid the dangerous romance of the mother tongue, the fantasy of the absolutely originary authorial subject. I take this to be Walter Benjamin’s point when, in the section of OneWay Street entitled “Chinese Curios,” he says, “Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it . . . because the reader follows the movement of this mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits to its command.” Benjamin then goes on to remark, “The Chinese practice of copying books was thus an incomparable guarantee of literary culture.”24 If, however, in Thailand, the history of writing is both a history of copying and a history of translating—from Pali, Sanskrit, and Khmer, among other languages—the history of literature is the history of the copyist’s appearance in the text. By the time of Atsani’s literary production, however, authorship had taken off from both copying and translating. In part, this may be traceable to the participation of monarchs in the project of writing. For in a context where the collective production of texts is inscribed under the name of a king or a prince, the figure of the author overtakes that of redactor. Kings had long presided over the codification of texts and indeed had been the commissioners of

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epic poetry, as well as Buddhological treatises, but by the twentieth century, the Chakkri dynasty kings and their relations were claiming the full status of writers. King Vajiravudh (or Rama VI, r. 1910–25) is perhaps the most extreme case of this regal authorial subjectivity, but he is certainly not alone.25 Pseudonymy, as a modern institution, can thus be contrasted to the mere anonymity of the copyist. It is a mode of intentional self-effacement quite distinct from the sublime submission to the text and to its inherent foreignness that is the mark of the translator. And yet, as a mode of political action, pseudonymy also partakes of that foreignness. Here, indeed, is the source of its radicality. For the foreignness that is embraced in the pseudonym is not a matter of territorial otherness or a matter than can be expelled. It is, to the contrary, something that one embraces in oneself: not the unique matter of an irreducibly singular history but that dimension of a self that is made possible by abstraction but, at the same time, is irreducible to it. It is the difference between singularity and generality that is made possible by abstraction. It is the difference of a relation between subjectivity and what Marx would have called species-being. This abstraction, the irresistible object of Marxist-communist and socialist desire, is also the immanence of translation and the possibility of a universal subjectivity. For a communist, and Atsani was unafraid to call himself that, pseudonymy was a revolutionary gesture precisely because it entailed the transcending of the individual subjectivity that bourgeois ideology would have asked him to affirm. One sees this most acutely in the contrast between the foreignness of the pseudonym that Atsani so willingly assumed and the understanding of foreignness that dominated Thailand during the period of his writing. Until very recently, all subjects in Siam inhabited a universe that was internally fractured by the presence of other languages and the demands for translation. Since the reign of King Narai in the latter part of the seventeenth century, when the prime minister’s office was held by a Greek man and French visitors could list more than a dozen languages being spoken in the city of Ayutthaya, Siam has been thoroughly multiple.26 It was only in the wake of British treaty negotiations, which culminated in the Bowring Treaty of 1855, that the problem of the foreign became a question of localizable otherness. Only under pressure from the British—who lamented, among other things, the Siamese failure to recognize foreignness in the Chinese—was foreignness localized, made a property of something out there, and imagined as something that could be contained or expelled. And only in relation to communism did the Thai state finally consolidate that territorialized conception of foreignness. One could write the history of Thai efforts to purge the Thai language itself of foreignness, efforts that included the rationalization of the Thai alphabet, and to invent Thai translations of words that, having come from afar, had nonetheless come to

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function as the cornerstone of national culturalist discourse: Thai culture (watthanatham thai), Thai identity (ekkalak thai), and so forth.27 But that is beyond the scope of this essay. What needs remarking here is merely the fact that Atsani chose to repudiate the demands of his class, embracing both anonymity and foreignness. That he could undertake that repudiation by virtue of his class position should not be forgotten. Yet, Atsani Phonlacan was an extraordinary and even exemplary man. In his literary and political engagements, he made self-effacement a mode of philosophical authenticity. He undertook what can be construed only as a kind of suicide of reputation, and through an ethics of philosophical suicide, he sustained an uncommon commitment to the communist project while transforming the possibilities for communism in Thailand. INVISIBILITIES

What is the relationship between pseudonymy and suicide? And between suicide and political authenticity? “Nai Phi,” the poet’s pseudonym and the revolutionary’s code name, appears in many of the poems of Atsani’s first collection, Kaap Khlon Nai Phi (The Kaap Khlon Verse of Nai Phi), as a figure. The name not only links the author and phantom persona in a doubled relation but also opens an unstable space between them, and it is into this space that the author, Atsani Phonlacan, disappears. The first line of the first stanza (Thai, bot) in the first poem introduces this spectral figure as the master not only of spirits but also of “the enchanting tongue” (phiset choi chiwhaa). Here, we infer the poet. Yet, in this, perhaps the most difficult and ambiguous of the collection’s verses, Nai Phi’s disappearance after the first line is also the subject’s disappearance. Henceforth, there is no direct subject of any statement, nor any immediately obvious referent of the descriptions and accusations. An anonymous crowd, uncannily resembling a horde of monkeys, matches Nai Phi’s silver-tongued speech, his ensorcelling words, with malice, gossip, and innuendo. And even the praise of fans becomes uncertain. Is admiration real or is it mere flattery? In the place of enchantment, the crowd gossips and wearies itself with the frenzy of its own dissimulations. Shame, which ought to guarantee the proper performance of a moral law, fails here to inhibit those dissimulations. Instead, insincerities abound and the appearance of admiration turns out, or may turn out, to be mockery. Indeed, it is the very shameless proliferation of admiring utterance that makes the dissimulating jeers possible. The magical speech of the master is shadowed by a malevolent gossip, which nonetheless has the additional capacity of inciting itself, elsewhere, in the babble of idiots. In another poem, entitled “Mo wiset” (The Sorcerer), the master himself is doubled by a “false magician.” In this latter poem, too, the phantom risk that is conjured is that in which truth and

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appearance, or, in the Thai Buddhological idiom, rupatham and namatham, will become indistinguishable. Yet, if Nai Phi’s poetry repeatedly warns against and imagines the failure of such a distinction, it also seems to resist the more facile versions of socialist realism that are so frequently associated with him in Thai literary critical circles. What, indeed, are we to make of a poetry that seems, on the one hand, to call for a transparent relation between intention and utterance, which disdains dishonesty, and that seems, on the other, to make such a mockery of those same demands? Let us begin, at the beginning, with “The End of Shame.” Sud thaang thii hiri Nai phii phiset choi Damni damnian thuai Fuung chomcheun chommaa Chomcheun reun lin loo

chiwhaa thoi thoo ko maak lao ling

Phiw ling son sae duai Sae phro’ nai hua sing Fang rao lae dang khok Saen thoi sud thoi reu

khon dok sing deu kheun theum rao’ man

Meuai paak meuai Hiri ryy mii khan Thii sud hiri nai Sud jak kheud too

plija paan rai khaeng daan dwan jeut too pai

mii hae

thon haa jao phoo

The End of Shame The Master of Spirits speaks with a tongue enchanted. The vile and dejected insinuate doubt, slur and slander. Admiring crowds gather joyously, grow multitudinous, Yet, mimicking admiration, the tongues of monkeys are mocking. Mindless and with malice are the monkeys Who dwell only in their minds, stupidly and stubbornly, The shit-dwelling scum teases us with its incessant laughing While the rapacity of base and servile people runs rampant. Exhausted in lip and limb, their tongues fall mute. Not even shame can cancel shamelessness. In the end, even shame in the soul Is impotent to hold back this crowd, which grows animal and goes on.

One could say that Nai Phi appears here, only to disappear. The name, or rather the ghost of a name, promises a reincarnation that never, finally, occurs. But why? Nai Phi is in “The End of Shame” that person against whom the shameless cast their aspersions. However, as the mere object of rumor and accusation, he is always the outside and the limit of their ca-

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pacity for truth. He haunts them with the failure of their speech to represent him and, more, to contain him. The one who evades the magical capture of words, which is also the magic of naming, enjoys the freedom and perhaps the happiness of ghosts. So, it is not merely hubris that leads Atsani Phonlacan to accept the pseudonym and the code name “Master of Spirits.” But among men, the ghost is dead. And the one who has disappeared into a pseudonym is likewise dead, if by dead we mean unrecognizable, unnameable. This is why the demands of revolution can be said to entail a suicide even before the possibility of actual deaths is contemplated. To enter the anonymity of a jungle warfare, of a secret insurrectionist movement, to relinquish families, contacts, and one’s own recognizability, is, in a most profound philosophical sense, to commit oneself to suicide. It is to embrace a perpetual exile, one that will be lived both inside and outside one’s home. Atsani’s refusal of the amnesty meant that he was an exile before he left Thailand, and, indeed, he did not depart the country for Laos until two years after the amnesty. To be anonymous as a revolutionary is one thing—a seemingly banal corollary of the fact of insurgency. It seems an entirely different matter to be anonymous as a writer. A few insurrectionists have undertaken this selfeffacement only to be restored to their proper name by criticism—Sade is simply the most extravagantly visible of this group. Yet, if Westerners are accustomed to thinking of literature as being, itself, a kind of insurrection, we rarely construe the work of the author as being correlate with the abandonment of one’s name or one’s self-sameness. Writing, as insurrection, has become a mode of sovereignty. And this despite the long funereal procession that has followed “the death of the author.” Only, as Blanchot says when reading Lefebvre, as a philosophical act can the suicide of anonymity be construed as the achievement of emancipation. In reviewing Henri Lefebvre’s La Somme et le reste, about Marxism and philosophy, Maurice Blanchot posed for himself the question of how a philosopher as great and as true as Lefebvre could have devoted himself, as a philosopher, to communism, when communism itself called for the surpassing and even the end of philosophy. And he responded by imagining that from within a certain philosophical position (that of Novalis, for example), suicide would itself constitute the achievement of the highest philosophical freedom. But “how to accept a form of suicide consisting in a survival so trite?”28 Lefebvre kept Marxism open to the future, according to Blanchot, and enriched it from within by the demands he made upon it to accommodate this very openness. But it is not this demand that constitutes, for Blanchot, the exemplarity of Lefebvre. Rather, it is the fact that he made of philosophy’s end an affirmation—without, at the same time,

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knowing what form that affirmation would take: “a world,” its “liquidation,” an “overcoming,” or a “renunciation.”29 It is possible, I think, to discern in Nai Phi’s life and writings something of the same commitment. Indeed, it is this very commitment that makes the stubborn exile intelligible. One could argue, of course, that Nai Phi simply loathed what Thailand had become following the restoration of military power and that he did not wish to live under a regime that had defined itself in opposition to communism. He did not live long enough to see the Soviet Union fall to pieces. Yet, he did live long enough to know what other Marxists around the world learned of the atrocities committed in the name of communism, and he was well aware of the killing fields. Still, he remained in Laos, as devoted to his cause and to his disappearance from Thailand as he was pained to be absent. A writer, a poet, a theorist of literature. The romanticism that would read these as callings and that would refuse any surrender of art to ideology is, however, also the romanticism that adheres to the Communist Party and demands the sacrifice of art. Both the romanticism of art and the romanticism of the party call for freedom in the mode of death—whether that mode be one of submission to a calling or the disciplining of irrational passions. Actual death makes these two attainable in a literal way, but exile—in actuality and in anonymity—makes this death a living condition and makes affirmation a state of perpetual and perpetually demanding self-denial, sacrifice, and oblivion. To both of these conditions, and long after they were fashionable, Nai Phi affirmed his relation. Of course, Blanchot’s explanation belies his sense that party membership and authorial sovereignty are antithetical. And in this, he articulates what is commonly taken for granted among the students of literature in both France and the United States. In many other places, however, the two seem less profoundly incompatible commitments, even though the embattled relations between parties and writers have tested that possible affinity again and again. It does not seem to be the case that communism and literature were as inimical to each other in Thailand as they were elsewhere. Not only Atsani but also Chit stood as icons of achievement in both domains. Indeed, it was Atsani’s poetry that first attracted Jit and drew Atsani to the attention of communist activists. Both men wrote significant works on poetic form in addition to the pieces that they wrote on economic inequity and the revolutionary demands of history. But if, for example, one were to compare their interventions with those of, say, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, in Indonesia, the question of literature would have to be posed anew. Pramoedya—a man whose literary status seems, in the eyes of so many, to have required his ambivalence, if not his outright refusal, of party politics—wrote in the mode of extremist modernism.30 His stories and his novels, and indeed his embrace of the novel form, attest to his imbrication in a tradition that encompasses figures like Joyce and Beckett and Kafka. Nei-

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ther Atsani nor Chit ever accommodated himself entirely to prose fiction, and in this, they each remained oddly traditional. But it is not merely their insistence on poetry that keeps Atsani and Chit outside the canons of modernist literature (and certainly one does not find their names circulating with those of Celan, Eliot, or Stevens). It is, rather, their insistence on a form that is at once divorced from and symmetrical with content that marks their writings as having been compromised—as literature. Most of Nai Phi’s poetry is dominated by a sense of outrage at the failure of correspondence between appearance and actuality. Among those pieces that were utter affronts to their audiences is a poem in which a monk’s life is conceived as one ceaseless false performance, a duplicitous pursuit of pleasure whose culminating moment sees the debauched former monk attempting to buy a young woman. Here, as in the other poems of the 1958 volume, anxiety attaches to the possibility that appearances are deceiving. The paragon of virtue is a pathetically needy man, incapable of any restraint, never mind the restraint of the eight precepts. The scandal of the monk, who is really a lecherous old man, makes the poem scandalous in and of itself, but only because the value of transparency allows the poem to partake of its object in a realist aesthetic. This would be obvious were the poem to have been written in a free form or if, instead, the author were to have written a prose story in which language effaces itself before the world. In Thailand, as elsewhere, the rise of prose, and especially the prose of science, is associated with the displacement of astrology by astronomy, metaphysics by physics, and poetry by the novel form. In this context, then, the deeper scandal of the poem lies in the fact that, despite its seeming insistence on the ethical and aesthetic value of transparency, it is formally “excessive.” Its gorgeously classical structure, which operates by virtue of alliteration, internal rhyming, and a vigorously regulated tonal placement, makes it profoundly untranslatable in some ultimate sense. Indeed, what constitutes its virtuosity in Thai would make it mere cliché in English. What constitutes its insurrection, however, is that it imports the value of prose, of the prose world, and, most emphatically, of abstraction (abstractable, commensurable truth) into poetry. One might say, rather more straightforwardly, that it infuses poetry with the project of both prose and socialism—with the fantasy of a socially instrumentalized abstraction.31 It subjects traditional form to the demands of revolution and, from within, makes of poetry a kind of artillery. Atsani had early on developed a strategy of subversion, when he took up King Vajiravudh’s antisocialist polemic and the discourse of “Phra Sri Arya Mettrya.” Phra Sri Arya is the name of the Future Buddha, a figure at the center of many Thai millenarian movements. It is thought that the present Buddhist era will terminate with his rise to preeminence and that his reign will be associated with a state of utter bliss, a being-beyond-lack. In many turn-of-the-

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(twentieth)-century discourses, this abundance was read in material terms, and especially as the overcoming of private property and class difference. In what Kasian Tejapira calls an “anticipatory move of cultural politics, to discredit or utopianize socialism even before it took root in Siam,”32 King Vajiravudh termed socialism a Religion of Sri Arya (Sassana Phra Sri Arya). With an accusation of untimeliness, Vajiravudh ridiculed this “religion” as a residual element of popular Buddhism, the kind that had been so repudiated by his predecessor, Rama IV (r. 1855–68). But when Atsani turned to the myth, he simply inverted it, claiming that the disregarded “utopia” existed in actuality, in “a country to the north which is the Union.”33 To usurp Thai classical myths was one thing. To usurp the forms of classical literature was another, but here Atsani achieved his greatest literary feats. His writings on the function of literature in relation to the project of revolution appeared in a number of venues, the most notable of these being the prominent leftist newspapers Mahachon and Aksornsarn. In their pages he not only eschewed monarchist poetry, the only purpose of which, he claimed, was “to titillate the ruling class’s sexual interests and to intoxicate the people,”34 but he also repudiated formalism in literary scholarship generally. The latter critique was undertaken in an acerbic attack on one of his cowriters at Aksornsarn, a certain Pleuang na Nakhorn, who wrote a column entitled “What Should Be Studied about Literary Composition.” Atsani’s response, “What Should Not Be Studied about Thai Literature,” articulated a deep suspicion of investments in “traditional form” for the sake of tradition, and in a series of articles under that title, he accused his contemporary literary critics of banality. Yet, crucially, Atsani did not disavow the forms themselves, and in this regard, he took some distance from the socialist realists of his generation. While insisting that the “content of revolutionary literature must agree with socialism,” he nonetheless held to the regulated and rhymed structures of Thai classical verse forms, claiming that they were “good enough.” The “principle of revolutionary literature was to keep the old form, create new content, national in form, socialist in content. The beauty can be created by the national characteristics while the good is done by socialist characteristics.”35 It is this specificity, what Atsani referred to as the “nationality” of the poems, then, that seems to resist translation, relying as it does on a belief in the phoneticism of the Thai language.36 But the socialism of the poetry relies on the translation that can be accommodated in and by Thai, by the capacity of the rhythmic structures and rhyming principles to respond to and contain something that is both foreign to and in excess of them. Literature here assumes the burden of a debate that occupied every Communist Party in Asia, namely, how to negotiate the distinct possibilities and demands of nationalist decolonization in relation to class internationalism. For Atsani Phonlacan,

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the necessary foreignness of the content, which was socialism, led to the adoption of a radically unstable lexicon and a practice that Kasian has referred to as esoteric. It is, indeed, possible to read this embrace of unstable signifiers, including his own pen name, as a mode of spectralization, an opening of poetry to foreignness itself. Let us consider this a little further. The poem in which Nai Phi appears as a figure is itself “about” magic. “The Sorcerer” (“Mo wiset”) taunts its readers with an opening line in which there “arises a false magician” (keud mo wiset sraeng). This is why it is not merely fanciful to treat “Nai Phi” as a code name (rather than a decodable sign) from a time when slogans had to carry the force of commandments and the foreignness of an ideology had to transform itself into words that, in turn, commanded individuals precisely because they had lifted off from their referents. But this is not an exclusively literary phenomenon. Search missions that currently operate in Thailand (in Buri Ram Pa Kham District and Nong Bua Lamphu in the Northeast, as well as Khao Chong Chang in Surat Thani) and are charged with the task of locating the bodies of those killed by government troops are often thwarted by the fact that “guerrillas used code names,” making it “hard checking who is still alive [sic].”37 Those who did die remain largely invisible because, as Preeda Khaobor, a member of one of the search teams says, “there are no maps or signs leading to the bodies.”38 The code names, then, generated a kind of secrecy, opening a space between individuals and their reputations, or, to translate the Thai expression for reputation literally, the “sound of their names.”39 In that space, individuals both disappeared and were enlarged, became phantasmatic and mobile as ghosts. In retrospect, one understands that it was not merely concealment that was being sought by the guerrillas but also the power of a name that would circulate beyond them. This power seemed, on the one hand, to entail knowledge of a secret (such as the locations of both fighting and dead guerrillas) and, on the other, to conceal the locus of that knowledge. It also made the guerrillas appear to be everywhere. The villagers who were inducted into nationalist counterinsurgency movements such as the Village Scouts40 and who were told of the imminent penetration of their communities by communists could only have wondered from which direction the Master of Spirits would come and how they would recognize his comrade, the ephemerally code-named Wind (Paalom).41 Nai Phi, Master of Spirits, comrade of men. There have been other men, some named with other pseudonyms of “Nai Phi,” some not, yet shrouded with the aura produced by possession of a secret: revolutionaries whose knowledge of the places of death have made them seem especially powerful. Chris Hani in South Africa comes to mind. And in the end, Hani was murdered less because of his political affiliation than because he seemed to know what every revolutionary needed to know: namely, where the bodies

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of the fallen lay. But there are many others. As often as not, these men are killed because they know of killings, know where the proof of those killings is. They promise justice and vengeance because they can answer to the commandments of law: habeas corpus. They are masters, if not of spirits, then of knowledge about the dead. It is, indeed, this knowledge, or the rumor of possessing such knowledge, that makes the names circulate. It is the rumor of knowledge that is itself only a citation that makes the names circulate as a warning—precisely because they imply an endless chain of others who also know. This is how communism becomes spectral, the second time. Nai Phi appears in the volume’s poem, entitled “Mo wiset,” as a “furiously mad” figure. As a citation, “Nai Phi” takes on the form of a slogan, a stock image that circulates, calling upon others to listen and do what they are told, but hiding its origins in an unknown space that is beyond the page, beyond the particular instance of its invocation. As a result, Atsani Phonlacan, the person, disappears into the spectral anonymity of the name that is not proper, the pseudonym “Nai Phi.” One is forced to recall here that the anticommunist propagandists of the Border Patrol Police, who oversaw most of the direct war with communists in Thailand, attributed magical power to the communists and disseminated rumors about their use of amulets and penis-shrinking medicines. They had been trained by the United States CIA, and although the CIA seemed to have understood (and feared) the magic of fetishes, they were less adept at restraining the fetishistic power of slogans. There are few apotropaic techniques strong enough to ward off the power of slogans. But history discloses this power and negates it at the same time. This is nowhere more visible than in the recent history of Nai Phi’s story. In the past few years, a copyright war has emerged around his literary works. Nai Phi is about to be enveloped not only by nationalism but also by his proper name, extracted from the chain of foreignness into which he inserted himself as a writer and to which he committed himself as a political exile. Returned, neutralized, domesticated. Perhaps this irony was inevitable. The poems’ having been published, having moved into the public domain, Nai Phi the figure overtook Atsani Phonlacan the man. One can say that the words mastered him. Far from being the master of a revolution, Atsani chose to become one of its instruments and to relinquish control—such as ever exists—over his future reputation.42 He died in Laos rather than in Thailand, as his comrade Chit Poumisak did, and he suffered the winter that is exile. But that does not mean that he wanted to come home. Indeed, had he wanted to come home, one can imagine that Atsani Phonlacan would have shucked off his revolutionary garments and his pseudonyms and done precisely that. The question to be asked now is, What is lost in this return?

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FALSE RETURNS

Atsani Phonlacan disappeared into his pseudonym and into the movement. This is as it should be, for the revolution can abide heroes only if they are, in some profound sense, pseudonymous, if they are representatives of something other than their individual identities. Yet, when Nai Phi himself disappeared with the refusal to go home, he could not have known that he would disappear again. Nor could he have known the doubled nature of that second vanishing. For the latter is the disappearance of both the pseudonym and the revolution. Restored to his name, known now as Atsani Phonlacan, the copyright war has made of a communist the individuated bearer of narrative rights in an era of reconsolidated authorial agency, the hero not of communism but of bourgeois ideology.43 And he has become this ironic hero in the moment that newspaper columnists invoke Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History” to describe Thailand and the world as inhabiting the wake of communism. It is not coincidence that we see Atsani Phonlacan returned to his proper name at the same time as nationalism comes to conceal the hierarchies that military power and capital achieve in their awful union. And we ought not to be surprised if these facts coincide with that other historical fact, namely, Thailand’s loss of economic sovereignty vis-à-vis the force of global capital and institutions such as the International Monetary Fund. For nationalism and globalization are but two dimensions of a single dialectic, one that is premised upon the refusal of radical difference. A few days after Nai Phi’s macabre return to Thailand, Onnucha Hutasingh, a columnist for the English-language daily the Bangkok Post, used the occasion to espouse for Thais, “regardless of how they would try to change Thailand, the full right to die on Thai soil.”44 The man who had seen return as an abrogation of revolutionary commitment has become, a mere decade after his death, an emblem for a newly assertive postcommunist nationalism. This nationalism reads his poem, “Khidtheung baan” (Missing Home or, more aptly, Homesickness) as the expression of the nation’s irrepressible power to call back its subjects, to effect the return that is not haunting but rather the quiet of being untroubled by alterity. This nationalism traces “selfimposed exile” to the policy of amnesty rather than the inequity that made a revolution seem necessary. And this nationalism wants hierarchy without haunting. If, then, there is still a specter whose troubling and mobile form remains, it appears under the sign of the question mark. How does a man who would not go home in life come to represent the possibility of an absolute return in death? How does a poet and theorist of literature, a champion of the proletariat, come to signify not the radicality of revolution but the fantasy of a national identity that precedes all other forms of identification and

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annuls all other forms of difference? Partial answers to these questions are to be discerned in the time, and in the timing, of Nai Phi’s return to Thailand. The end of 1997 was, of course, a moment of nearly unprecedented economic catastrophe in Thailand. The baht (the national currency) had collapsed, a significant portion of the banking and financial services sector of the economy was on the verge of bankruptcy, and the International Monetary Fund was offering a bail-out package whose terms were—for all intents and purposes—the loss of national sovereignty in the domain of fiscal management. By the end of that year, the beginnings of a lunatic process of reruralization became visible, and the middle class, which had seemed secure enough to demand the reform of government only five years previously, seemed about to disappear into the abyss of personal indebtedness and corporate overextension. In the transnational imaginary, Thailand was becoming a figure of original corruption. The discourses of New Tiger status, by which Thailand asserted its membership in the category of newly developed nations, were deeply shaken by the crisis and began to assume the aura of the ridiculous. Metaphors of infection and contamination, which had previously been localized in the domains of health and sexuality, were exploded so as to articulate a general mode of relation between Thailand and the rest of the world. In the languages of bankers, bureaucrats, and international policy makers, Thailand became the metonymic sign of a kind of relationality behind and beneath that of global capital: one of promiscuity and indiscriminate contact, unregulated by the principles of economy, excessive in every dimension. A failure to ensure the terms of a zero-sum game, a failure to demand proof of collateral assets as a condition of extending credit, was posited as the original cause of economic crisis, and in this, Thailand was said to have been particularly negligent. To a certain degree, then, Thailand was being asked to play an impossible role. Insofar as the emerging specter of global economic pandemonium could be said to have an origin, it was said to be a national one: Thailand. From within this discourse, then, one of Thailand’s most egregious sins lay in its incapacity to ensure that the phenomenon be contained in and by the nation. The rhetoric of plagues made infectivity a definitive and even originary attribute of Thai culture. Yet, if anything, the crisis in Thailand was itself a symptom of an economic structure that exceeded the nation, that operated precisely over and above the nation. Offshore manufacturing, fluctuations in the currency market propelled by both the Chinese devaluation of the yuan and speculation by U.S. and European currency traders, and, of course, the emergence of cheaper labor forces in the decimated economies of Laos, Cambodia, and parts of post-Soviet Europe—all these factors (among others) played an important role in the destabilization of Southeast Asian economies. They were reinforced by

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other factors, such as the aging of oligarchical power brokers and the maturation of local media and telecommunications networks. These developments were, however, merely the historically particular form of a more general condition of (late) capital. Indeed, the infectivity that Thailand was made to signify and whose force it was assumed to have generated was merely the flip side of its own encompassment by what was, and must always already have been, the essential foreignness of capital in its hegemonic form. For, as Marx well knew, the commodity is a form that exists only at the boundaries of communities, in the mode of translation, and an internal difference is the very source of its power to move, across space, in time. Thus, when, in response to the overwhelmingly destructive demands of the International Monetary Fund, local elites began to articulate intense forms of nationalist commitment, they were actually, if ironically, partaking of the global economy’s logic. They posited as an antecedent that which the forces of globalization had themselves created: a discrete nation defined by its absolute priority to the regime of globality. In this, then, they shared the global order’s blindness to the fact that such antecedents could be projected only backward from within capital and that the national local (as a categorical type) could have emerged only in the moment of universalization.45 What mattered in these calls for a return to the values of the nation (chat) and the values of “national culture” (watthanatham thai) was the sense that the dissipation of national value could be mitigated by the assertion of local values. Thailand’s exchangeability could be substituted for by an insistence on difference, the difference that culture makes. Never mind that this culture would itself require the obliteration of difference— as, indeed, must all notions of national culture—or that it would become one more object in the traffic of local things. For conservatives in Thailand, and indeed for many progressives, the assertion of cultural difference was the means of playing the subversive game, albeit in the language of domination. It was the point from which the International Monetary Fund could be refused. And it was in this milieu that Nai Phi could be called back in the body of Atsani Phonlacan. Here, the grief and desire of a widow and friends could facilitate the nation’s encompassment of individuals and their particular choices—including, in this case, the choice of exile. Against the forces of a globality whose pathological form Thailand had come to signify, Atsani Phonlacan’s return could perform a double labor. On the one hand, the return could represent Thailand’s eligibility for membership in the community of nations whose liberalism takes the form of a claim to tolerance. On the other hand, and in uneasy tension with the former possibility, Atsani’s return could represent a certain disavowal of those universalizing processes—both capitalist and socialist—which had been implicated in the destruction of national value. At last, said all the pundits, now that the war with communism is over, Atsani Phonlacan can

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come home. In all the stories of his belated journey across the Mekong River, none neglected reference to his homesickness, and all inscribed this return as the actualization rather than the betrayal of a political commitment whose form had, for so long, demanded exile—exile from Thailand and exile from the idea and the values of cultural nationalism. One wants to insist that an opposition to the naïvely essentialist form of nationalism that goes under the name of cultural or ethno-nationalism does not mean an opposition to all forms of national affiliation. Like most Thai radicals, Atsani was concerned to articulate a form of revolutionary ideology that was appropriate to Thailand and to extricate it from the burden of a history whose origins lay in Chinese and Vietnamese expatriate organization in Thailand, rather than a strictly indigenous radicality. The party had early changed its name from the Thai Communist Party to the Communist Party of Thailand to reflect a national rather than an ethnic character.46 But when a senior CPT member named Phin Bua-on argued that more ethnically Thai members needed to be recruited to the party and given leadership roles, the Chinese Communist Party objected. Atsani himself perceived this foreign “intervention” in Thai revolutionary affairs as an affront and a violation of Thai sovereignty. His often critical position vis-à-vis the CCP, particularly in the aftermath of Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia and the CCP’s demand that the CPT withdraw from Laos, saw him chastised, censored, censured, demoted, and discriminated against from within the Communist Party. It is, however, testimony to his commitment to communism that his sense of national affront did not generate a retreat into the conservative nationalism of his many compatriots who, soon after the amnesty, abandoned the Struggle for the pleasures of urban middle-class existence. It may be that Atsani could maintain his commitment because he believed his analysis of communism was superior to that of his CCP comrades, that he possessed the truth. But it is more in keeping with his radical poetics, that he could both defend Thai sovereignty and assume an infinite exile because he thought of communism, as Blanchot, reading Lefebvre, would describe it: as that which “does not let itself be designated by what it names.”47 The time of ruin is always also the time of returns. This is Walter Benjamin’s lesson.48 And the ruin is the achievement of a permanence unattainable in historical time. This is Georg Simmel’s lesson.49 Nationalism can be understood as a discourse that simultaneously ruptures the local and makes of it a fetish, that opens people to the principles of universalization and seeks closure on that possibility. As Benedict Anderson has so persuasively argued, it entails the insertion of local individuals into horizontal relations of serial substitutability, and it induces in them a haunted and haunting habit of imagining themselves as being like others.50 Always doubled by another, always slightly outside the categories to which they claim

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membership, national subjects are transected by myriad universalisms. And, in consequence, they are subject to all the terror that such a position entails. They are prone to its anxieties, vulnerable to the phantasms of a local unity that promises to heal over these otherwise constantly weeping lacerations. One could speculate (knowing full well that speculation enjoys an ambivalent etymology in which insight and occlusion are wedded) that, having become mere remains, Atsani would have to return to Thailand. Or, at least, one could speculate that his exile had come to mean more than his return and that, from a conservative standpoint, he would be better on “native soil.” The fact of his body’s stubborn existence seemed, constantly, to promise the remembrance of a bloody, painful period of virtual civil war. Uninterred, it seemed to suggest the deferral, rather than the defeat, of a revolution. It seemed to suggest that memory could be made to anticipate the future. It seemed, that is, to be in the position of that “specter” whose apparition had haunted Marx’s own Manifesto, because the conservative narrative of communism’s surpassing is essentially one that believes capitalism’s triumph to be a return to the same, of the same. That which would remain in exile, even after its own defeat, refutes this claim. It refutes the very idea of history’s end and posits, instead, history as a difference that needs to be reckoned with. The radicality of this exile is not, however (and this is the point), its insistence on a material difference or even on the difference of materiality. To the contrary, it lies in an implicit postulation that the difference—one wants to say “the Difference”—of (H)istory is less material specificity than abstraction and even alienation. It is this difference that is lost in the appropriation of Atsani Phonlacan for the nation by the nation. It is this difference that has yet to be mourned. But mourning, for the Master of Spirits, could properly consist only of a willingness to be haunted by that which is neither singular nor originary but, quite simply, open to the future and the translation that it demands. It would require the embrace not of nation but of alienation, the surrender of home and, of course, of proper names.

NOTES

The epigraphs are from Benedict Anderson, “Radicalism after Communism,” in The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World (London: Verso, 1998), 295, and Wat Wanlayangkoon, Duai rak haeng udomkan (With ideological love) (Bangkok: Nokhook Press, 1981), 91, cited in Kasian Tejapira, “Commodifying Marxism: The Formation of Modern Thai Radical Culture, 1927–1956,” Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University, 1992, and forthcoming under the same title from Transpacific Press, Kyoto Area Studies on Asia. 1. I use the term Marxist-communist following Kasian Tejapira, to distinguish At-

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sani’s particular ideological commitments from those of other revolutionaries in Thailand, whose positions ranged from democratic socialist, to republican antimonarchist, to monarchist socialist. However, the term Marxist-communist does not yet describe the relationships between Thai communism and the competing forms of Leninist and Maoist Marxism. Indeed, these changed considerably over the course of the twentieth century. For a magnificent history of this development, see Kasian, “Commodifying Marxism”; also see Yuangrat Wedel with Paul Wedel, Radical Thought, Thai Mind: The Development of Revolutionary Ideas in Thailand (Bangkok: Assumption Business Administration College, 1987). 2. See Mary Ann Doane, “Temporality, Storage, Legibility: Freud, Marey and the Cinema,” Critical Inquiry 22, no. 2 (1996): 171–74. 3. I have elsewhere written about the democracy movement in Thailand. See “Surviving Pleasure at the Periphery: Chiang Mai and the Photographies of Political Trauma, 1976–1992,” Public Culture 10, no. 2 (1998): 341–70. 4. When considering the fate of radicalism in Thailand, Benedict Anderson himself invoked Fukuyama as the specter of future failure, speculating that the question for Thai communists in the 1990s was whether there was anything left other than “to anticipate Fukuyama’s dicta, and tag along in the interminable train of Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson” (Anderson, “Radicalism after Communism,” 295). 5. For this understanding of the historiographical problem posed by analyses of modernity, I am indebted to Dipesh Chakravarty and especially his essay “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for ‘Indian’ Pasts,” in Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Padmini Mongia (London: Arnold, 1996), 223–47. 6. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in General Psychological Theory, trans. Joan Rivière (New York: Collier Books, 1963; originally published 1916–18), 164–79. 7. Jacques Derrida, “The Art of Mémoires,” in Mémoires for Paul de Man, trans. Jonathan Culler, rev. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 45–88, quotation on 49. 8. Derrida, “The Art of Mémoires,” 58. 9. Atsani was certainly not the first communist in Thailand, or even the first scholar of Marxism. That honor belongs more properly to Supha Sirimanond (1914–86), who wrote the first substantial response to Marx’s Capital, in what became the canonical pillar of Thai Marxist thought, Khaepitalist: Khambanyai waduai kamnoed, khrongsang, khwaamsongyoo lae kod haeng khwaamkhleuanwai khong yuk khaepitalist (Capitalism: Lectures on the origins, structure, existence and laws of motion in the age of capitalism) (Bangkok: Chulalongkorn University Social Research Institute Publications, 1951). Atsani was born only four years after Supha, but he was, effectively, of a younger generation, completing his law degree in 1940. He came to communism later, joining the party only in 1950, but his life span correlates with that of Marxist radicalism in Thailand. In this connection, it is important to recall, with Kasian Tejapira, that anticommunism actually predates communism in Thailand, having been imported by the first generation of Thai scholars to be educated abroad. The anticipatory opposition to communism was perhaps most powerfully articulated by King Vajiravudh, whose diaries expressed contempt for socialism even

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before the Russian Revolution. The result was that an emergent radical discourse had to find room for itself amid suspicion that rejected it as anti-Thai, and many noncommunists and nonsocialists were accused of a radicalism that was not properly their own. See Kasian, “Commodifying Marxism,” 31–46. 10. Jit Poumisak, Chomna sakdina thai nai patchuban (originally published 1957), translated as Thai Radical Discourse: The Real Face of Thai Feudalism Today by Craig J. Reynolds (Ithaca: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1987). 11. “The People’s Poet,” Nation, November 1, 1998, 3 (internet edition: http:// 203.146.51.4/nationnews/1998/199801/19980111/20841.html). Also see Suchira Kupatarak, “An Analysis of Nai Phi’s Poems,” M.A. thesis, Sri Nakharinwirot University, 1983. 12. “The People’s Poet,” 1. 13. Pridi was not exiled permanently. He returned at various points throughout the history of Thailand’s middle decades to lead the leftist cause and compete for elected office. He even staged a countercoup at one point before finally seeking refuge in China. 14. “The People’s Poet,” 2. 15. This period has been especially well treated in the essays in Craig Reynolds’s collection National Identity and Its Defenders: Thailand, 1939–89 (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Press, 1991). 16. King Rama VI had put his imprimatur on such sinophobia with his inimitable essay “The Jews of the East.” For a discussion of this essay and the history of the Chinese in Thailand, see William Skinner’s classic Chinese Society in Thailand: An Analytical History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1957). 17. As Thongchai Winichakul has argued, the emergence of the modern polity known as Siam (later Thailand) is inextricable from this aggression, and moreover, that aggression was productive of Thailand’s unification. Prior to the nineteenth century, the question of sovereignty could not be posed at the national level. Rather, multiple sovereignties coexisted, and the geopolitical territory—what Thongchai calls the geo-body of the nation—had yet to be integrated. During the period considered here, narratives of European aggression were nonetheless imagined in terms of a retrojected and naturalized ur-nation, which preceded European intervention in the area. These narratives necessarily repressed the existence of different polities whose absorption and conversion within the Siamese national project were achieved only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They also tended to fetishize the Chinese and the Sino-Thai communities as the sites of foreignness within Thailand. See Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: The History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994). 18. A seemingly absurd amount of legal energy was devoted to the question of hats, first in the special prohibition on hat-snatching (ca. 1905), then in the requirement that they be worn. I have written elsewhere about the concern with hats in terms of the increasing valorization and regulation of appearances in Thai modernity. See Rosalind Morris, In the Place of Origins: Modernity and Its Mediums (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), especially chapter 6. 19. On this period, Thak Chaloemtiarana, The Politics of Paternal Despotism (Bangkok: Social Science Association of Thailand and Thai Khadi Institute, 1979), is

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especially insightful. Pasuk Phongpaichit’s “The Open Society and Its Enemies,” which describes the relationships between the Sarit regime and the reopening of the Thai economy and Thailand’s relationship to the United States, which was militarily involved in Asia at this time with the Korean War, is also exemplary for the clarity of its explications of the moment’s political economy. 20. On the histories of Thailand’s relationship to the United States and the counterinsurgency efforts that were supported by the CIA, see Thomas Lobe’s United States National Security Policy and Aid to the Thailand Police, Monograph Series in World Affairs, vol. 14, no. 2 (Denver: University of Denver, 1977). 21. Kasian, “Commodifying Marxism,” 140 n. 1; also Nai Phi, “Nai Phi kheu khrai?” (Who is Nai Phi?), Siam Nikorn, December 28, 1946; Nai Phi, “A Specter Is Haunting Siam?” Siam Samai 122, September 18, 1949; Nai Phi, “A Specter’s Confession,” Siam Samai 141, January 27, 1950. 22. Yuangrat and Wedel, Radical Thought, Thai Mind, 87. 23. “The People’s Poet,” 2. 24. Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street (London: Verso, 1997; originally published 1979), 50. What Benjamin describes for the reader bears strong resemblance to that jouissance to which Barthes devotes The Pleasure of the Text, but it is Siegel’s discussion of the author’s emergence from copying, as a historical function, that informs my discussion here. See Siegel, Fetish, Recognition, Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), especially chapter 1. 25. Vajiravudh also wrote using pseudonyms, but in the case of the monarch’s authorship, there was never much question as to where the works originated, even when such publications entailed the king’s use of a language that was beneath him (i.e., common Central Thai instead of the royal idiom). 26. It is, of course, something of an anachronism to speak of Siam in relation to Ayutthaya. Although the name “Siam” was used at the time, readers should not conflate it with the nation-state that had yet to cohere around the capital of Bangkok. Ayutthaya was a maritime city-state like others of the era. The properly modern nation of Siam is much more recent. 27. See Reynolds’s “Introduction” to National Identity and Its Defenders, 1–39. 28. Maurice Blanchot, “Slow Obsequies,” in Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 83–92, 84; original French published as L’Amité (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1971). 29. Blanchot, “Slow Obsequies,” 86. 30. Hendrik Maier is particularly emphatic about remarking on Pramoedya’s refusal to endorse communism, and James Siegel has recently articulated a forceful argument that opposes literature and statist politics to each other. In the same argument, Siegel reserves the term revolutionary literature for writers, like Pramoedya, whose disavowal of singular meaning and the hermeneutic project made their works both enigmatic and deeply threatening to new orders that were seeking power only in the mode of substitution for coloniality. See Siegel, Fetish, Recognition, Revolution. 31. The recognition of socialism’s “investment” in abstraction is often a difficult one to make. In her rereading of Marx and of Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf, rev. ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak notes the

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necessity of this recognition and Derrida’s reticence to do so. Her essay “Ghostwriting” (diacritics 25 [1995]: 65–84) deserves to be quoted for this reason alone. More than this, the salutary demands that she makes upon those who still claim affiliation with Marx but who are loathe to read him as anything but a philosopher (a position equally eschewed by Derrida) have, to a significant degree, informed my approach to Atsani Phonlacan’s work. 32. Kasian, “Commodifying Marxism,” 44. 33. Atsani Phonlacan, “Uttarakuru thaweep” (The land of Uttarakuru), Kaanmuang 4 (August 21, 1948), 3, cited in Kasian, “Commodifying Marxism,” 298. 34. Intarayuth, Jaak Phra Lor lae Sri Burapa (From Phra Loo and Sri Burapha), (Bangkok: Samnak Shai Rak, 1975), 21, cited in Yuangrat and Wedel, Radical Thought, Thai Mind, 79. 35. Intarayuth, Jaak Phra Lor, 110–11, cited in Yuangrat and Wedel, Radical Thought, Thai Mind, 83. 36. Thai is a tonal language, with five tones, but unlike Chinese, it is alphabetized. For a good introduction to the logic and principles of Thai poetry in English, see: Mom Chao Chand C. Rajani, Poetry 2000 A.D.: An Explanation of the Thai Use of Inner Rhymes (privately published, 1984); and Thomas J. Hudak, The Indigenization of Pali Meters in Thai Poetry (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1990). 37. Onnucah Hutasingh, “Thais Learn to Forgive Differences of the Past,” Bangkok Post, November 29, 1997, p. 4 (internet version: http://www.bkkpost.samart. co.th/news/BP971129/2911_news29.htm). 38. Quoted by Onnucah, in “Thais Learn to Forgive Differences of the Past.” 39. In Thai, someone who is famous is said to have a name that “sounds loudly” (cheu mii siang). The literal translation is, of course, a laboriously self-conscious alienation of sense, but one that, in this context, reveals the aporetic logic of codenaming. 40. For an account of the Village Scouts and the history of the counterinsurgency movement in Thailand, see Katherine A. Bowie, Rituals of National Loyalty: An Anthropology of the State and the Village Scout Movement in Thailand (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). 41. “Paalom” was the code name given to Wimol Phonlacan, Atsani’s wife and comrade in arms. Translated literally, it means “Aunt Wind” or, simply, “wind.” 42. My understanding of the operations of the slogan, as a fetish of foreignness that operates precisely because of its generality and its foreignness, is drawn from James T. Siegel’s brilliant reading of the Indonesian Revolution in Fetish, Recognition, Revolution, especially 212–13. 43. See “Seuk liksit wannakam ‘Nai Phi’” (Copyright war over the literary works of Nai Phi), in Nation seub sapdaa (Nation newspaper weekend magazine), January 26, 1999 (internet edition: http://www.nationgroup.com/natwk/34606/34606. htm); and “10 pii khong paalom kap kitjakam pheua ‘Nai Phi’” (10 years of Paalom and the works for Nai Phi), in Nation seub sapdaa (Nation newspaper weekend magazine), January 26, 1999 (internet edition: http://www.nationgroup.com/natwk/ 34607/34607.htm). 44. Onnucah, “Thais Learn to Forgive Differences of the Past.” 45. See Theodor Adorno on the negative dialectic between universality and par-

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ticularity in his discussion of the concept in Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1994; originally published 1966). For a concrete historical account of the emergence of the Thai nation in the space of contact with European forces and in the process of being translated in and by that contact with a universalizing discourse, see Thongchai’s Siam Mapped. It is worth remarking, in this context, that in his revision of Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson refers to Thongchai’s book as the new locus classicus for studies of the relation between nationhood and territorialized modernity. He has also added a chapter that responds to arguments made by Thongchai. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 2d ed. (London: Verso, 1995). 46. Kasian, “Commodifying Marxism,” 125. 47. Blanchot, “Notes,” in Friendship, 295. 48. One can find this argument scattered throughout Benjamin’s writings, including The Origin of German Tragic Drama, the posthumously assembled “PassagenWerke,” in Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, prepared on the basis of the German volume, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), and in his essays such as “Theses on the Philosophy of History” and “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Its most recognizable image is, of course, that of Klee’s angel blown by the wind, facing backward but moving forward with the debris of history strewn before—and therefore behind—him. 49. Georg Simmel, “The Ruin,” in Essays on Sociology, Philosophy, and Aesthetics, ed. Kurt Wolff, trans. David Kettler (New York: Harper and Row, 1959), 259–66; original German published in 1911. 50. Benedict Anderson, “Seriality,” in Specters of Comparison: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World (London: Verso, 1998), 29–45.

Fred Moten

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in the sound of the photograph: childless mother. I want to discover a performance by way of the ongoing production of a performance. In her essay, “ ‘Can You Be black and Look at This?’ Reading the Rodney King Video(s),” Elizabeth Alexander recites a narrative: In August 1955, in Money, Mississippi, a fourteen-year-old Chicago black boy named Emmett Till, nicknamed “Bobo,” was visiting relatives and was shot in the head and thrown in the river with a mammoth cotton gin fan tied around his neck, for allegedly whistling at a white woman. In some versions of the story, he was found with his cut-off penis stuffed in his mouth. His body was shipped to Chicago, and his mother [Mamie Till Bradley] decided he should have an open casket funeral; the whole world would see what had been done to her son. According to the Chicago-based, black newsweekly Jet, hundreds of thousands of mourners “in an unending procession, later viewed the body” at the funeral home. A photograph of Till in the casket—his head mottled and swollen to many times its normal size—ran in Jet, and largely through that medium, both the picture and Till’s story became legendary. The caption of the close-up photograph of Till’s face read: “Mutilated face of victim was left unretouched by the mortician at the mother’s request. She said she wanted ‘all the world’ to witness the atrocity.”1

And here are two passages from Nathaniel Mackey’s Bedouin Hornbook that invoke a sound correspondent to the massive implications of the image Alexander has brought again into view and into question: . . . I’m especially impressed by its long overdue disinternment of the occult, heretofore inchoate arcana intuitively buried within the reaches—the wordless reaches—of the black singer’s voice. Would it be going too far to say that in your essay the black falsetto has in fact found its voice? (Forgive me if I 59

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fred moten embarrass you.) In any case, the uncanny coincidence is that the draft of your essay arrived just as I’d put on a record by Al Green. I’ve long marveled at how all this going on about love succeeds in alchemizing a legacy of lynchings—as though singing were a rope he comes eternally close to being strangled by. . . . One point I think could bear more insistent mention: What you term “the dislocated African’s pursuit of a meta-voice” bears the weight of a gnostic, transformative desire to be done with the world. By this I mean the deliberately forced, deliberately “false” voice we get from someone like Al Green creatively hallucinates a “new world,” indicts the more insidious falseness of the world as we know it. (Listen, for example, to “Love and Happiness.”) What is it in the falsetto that thins and threatens to abolish the voice but the wear of so much reaching for heaven? At some point you’ll have to follow up this excellent essay of yours with a treatment of the familial ties between the falsetto, the moan and the shout. There’s a book by a fellow named Heilbut called The Gospel Sound you might look into. At one point, for example, he writes: “The essence of the gospel style is a wordless moan. Always these sounds render the indescribable, implying, ‘Words can’t begin to tell you, but maybe moaning will.’” If you let “word” take the place of “world” in what I said above the bearing this has on your essay should become pretty apparent. (During his concert a few weeks back Lambert quoted an ex-slave in Louisiana as having said, “The Lawd done said you gotta shout if you want to be saved. You gotta shout and you gotta moan if you wants to be saved.” Take particular note of the end of “Love and Happiness,” where Green keeps repeating, “Moan for love.”) Like the moan or the shout, I’m suggesting, the falsetto explores a redemptive, unworded realm—a meta-word, if you will—where the implied critique of the momentary eclipse of the word curiously rescues, restores and renews it: new word, new world.2 Flaunted Fifth heard the noise of a helicopter overhead. He noticed the cops in the police car looking this way. The emotional figure he absentmindedly toyed with was given an abruptly ominous edge by the setting sun, the helicopter overhead and the police car circling the block, all of which put an inverse halo around it. A panicky rush ran thru him as the cops continued to look his way. He couldn’t help remembering that several black men had been killed by the L.A. police in recent months, victims of a chokehold whose use there were now efforts to outlaw. The V-shaped warmth in the crook of his right arm seemed to detach itself, rise up and, like an ironic boomerang, press itself against the front of his neck. He imagined himself held in the sweaty crook of a cop’s arm. It was hard not to be overwhelmed by the lethal irony which invaded everything. Flaunted Fifth was suddenly haunted by once having written that the use of the falsetto in black music, the choked-up ascent into a problematic upper register, had a way, as he’d put it, of “alchemizing a legacy of lynchings.” He’d planned to make use of this idea again in his lecture/demonstration, but the prospect of a cop’s arm around his neck reminded him that every concept, no matter how figural or sublime, had its literal, dead-letter aspect

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as well. It now seemed too easy to speak of “alchemy,” too easy not to remember how inescapably real every lynching had been. He’d always thought of himself as an advocate of spirit. He should have known the letter might someday do him in. The ominous edge he picked up on was also, he realized, an attribute of spirit. Overtones and resonances inhabited the letter, causing it to creak like the floorboards and doors in a haunted house. That the emotional triad he absentmindedly toyed with, the triangulation he’d made a note of to himself, should creak with overtones of strangulation came as no surprise. That Namesake Epigraph #4 should be haunted by patriarchal patrol cars and helicopters, that it should creak with patriarchal prohibitions against public speech, equally came as no surprise. It all confirmed a “creaking of the spirit” he’d heard referred to in a song from the Bahamas many years before. That the creaking might kill was the price one occasionally paid. “No blues without dues,” he reminded himself, making another mental note for his pilot radio show.3

Some attribute to Emmett Till—which is to say to his death, which is to say to the famous picturing and display, staging and performance, of his death or of him in death—the agency that set in motion this nation’s profoundest political insurrection and resurrection, the resurrection of reconstruction, a second reconstruction like a second coming of the Lord.4 If this is true, how is it true? On this question Alexander subscribes to James Baldwin’s formulation, in The Evidence of Things Not Seen, that Till’s murder—which in its particularity is not unlike a vast chain of such events stretching across a long history of brutal violence—can stand out, resonate, or be said to produce effects only because of the moment of its occurrence, a moment that is possible only after the beginning of the insurrection and resurrection it is claimed to have sparked. As Alexander remarks, Baldwin’s claims regarding this matter are astute: Till’s death bears the trace of a particular moment of panic when, “under the knell of the Supreme Court’s all deliberate speed,” there was massive reaction to the movement against segregation. (That particular moment of panic is a point on an extended trajectory, where that panic seems almost always to have been—among other things, though this is not just one thing among others—sexual. So that the movement against segregation is seen as a movement for miscegenation and, at that point, whistling or the “crippled speech” of Till’s “Bye, baby” cannot go unheard.5 This means we’ll have to listen to it along with various other sounds that will prove to be unneutralizable and irreducible.) The fact that whatever force Till’s death exerted was not originary does not mean, however, that that force wasn’t real. For even if his death marked panic and even if that panic had already led to the deaths of so many, so that his death was already haunted—its force only the animating spirit of a train of horrors—something happened. Something real—in that it might have been

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otherwise—happened. So that we need to be interested in the complex, dissonant, polyphonic affectivity of the ghost, the agency of the fixed but multiply apparent shade, an improvisation of spectrality, another development of the negative. All these have to do with another understanding of the photograph and of a deferral of some inevitable return to the ontological that would operate in the name of a utopian vision and in the sharpest critique of those authoritarian modes of (false) differentiation and (false) universalization (ultimately, the same thing) that seem to have ontology or the ontological impulse as their condition of possibility and that seem to indicate that that impulse or activity could never have ended any other way. So I’m interested in what a photograph—what this photograph—does to ontology, to the politics of ontology, and to the possibility and project of a utopian politics outside ontology. How can this photograph challenge ontological questioning? By way of a sound and by way of what’s already there in the decision to display the body, to publish the photograph, to restage death and rehearse mo(ur)nin(g). This includes a political imperative that is never disconnected from an aesthetic one, from a necessary reconstruction of the very aesthetics of photography, of documentary, and, therefore, of truth, revelation, and enlightenment as well as of judgment, taste, and, therefore, the aesthetic itself. Mackey moves toward this, and yet what is made in such sounding, or rather the theory and theorist of such making, is haunted by a destruction she or it can never assimilate or exhaust. And this is not just about some justification, as if the blues were worth it. Rather, we have to think about the fact that an aesthetic appropriation could be said to desacrilize the legacy of lynchings, precisely by way of an “alchemizing” that seems to fetishize or figure on the literal, on the absolute fact and reality of so many deaths while continually opening the possibility of redemption in out sensuality. Which is to say that the blues are not worth the dues pai(n: trace of something made me type; I had to leave it in: Payne: it’ll come back later)d in order to produce them, but they are part of the condition of possibility of the end of such extortion. So this is about the cut music enacts on the image and after the fact of a set of connections between death and the visual, between looking and retribution—as arrest, abduction, and abjection. What did the hegemony of the visual have to do with the death of Emmett Till? What effect did the photograph of his body have on death? What affect did it send? How did the photograph and its reproduction and dissemination break the hegemony of the visual? “Cousins remembered him as ‘the center of attention’ who ‘liked to be seen. He liked the spotlight,’ ”6 but he’ll be heard, too, as broken speech and talking wind, a cry from outside, interior exteriority of the photograph. In positing that this photo and photographs in general bear a phonic substance, I want to challenge not only the ocularcentrism that generally—

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perhaps necessarily—shapes theories of the nature of photography and our experience of photography but also that mode of semiotic objectification and inquiry that privileges the analytic-interpretative reduction of phonic materiality and/or nonmeaning over something like a mimetic improvisation of and with that materiality that moves in excess of meaning.7 This second challenge assumes that the critical-mimetic experience of the photograph takes place most properly within a field structured by theories of (black) spectatorship, audition, and performance. These challenges are also something of a preface to such theory, and they attempt to work out a couple of that theory’s most crucial elements: the anti-interpretive nonreduction of nonmeaning and the breakdown of the opposition between live performance and mechanical reproduction—all this by way of an investigation of the augmentation of mourning by the sound of moaning, by a religious and political formulation of morning that animates the photograph with a powerfully material resistance. We have to try to understand the connection between that resistance and political movement, locating that movement’s direction toward new universalities held within the difference(s) of phonic substance, within the difference of the accent that cuts and augments mourning and morning, a difference semiotics has heretofore thought either to be fatal to its desire for universality or to be proof of the foolishness and political and epistemological danger of that desire.

There is the trace of what remains to be discovered, a topic, a path I’m trying to take that moves through a shudder I can never escape when gazing, or even after the fact of an arrested and arresting glance, at the broken face of Emmett Till. Looking at Emmett Till is arrested by overtonal reverberations;8 looking demurs when it opens onto an unheard sound that the picture cannot secure but discovers and onto all of what it might be said to mean that I can look at this face, this photograph. This is to say not only look at it but look at it in the context of an aesthetics, look at it as if it were to be looked at, as if it were to be thought, therefore, in terms of a kind of beauty, a kind of detachment, independence, autonomy, that holds open the question of what looking might mean in general, what the aesthetics of the photograph might mean for politics, and what those aesthetics might have meant for Mamie Till Bradley in the context of her demand that her son’s face be seen, be shown, that his death and her mourning be performed. Emmett Till’s face is seen, was shown, shone. His face was destroyed (by way of, among other things, its being shown: the memory of his face is thwarted, made a distant before-as-after effect of its destruction, what we would never have otherwise seen). It was turned inside out, ruptured, ex-

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ploded, but deeper than that it was opened. As if his face were the truth’s condition of possibility, it was opened and revealed. As if revealing his face would open the revelation of a fundamental truth, his casket was opened, as if revealing the destroyed face would in turn reveal, and therefore cut, the active deferral or ongoing death or unapproachable futurity of justice. As if his face would deconstruct justice or deconstruct deconstruction or deconstruct death, though this infinite and circular chain seems too muddled, too crazy, too twisted or clotted, as if it, too, were in need of another cut, it was shown. As if that face revealed “the beginning of death in cut time,”9 as if this was a death unlike other deaths, a death that prompts a mourning whose rehearsal is also a refusal, a death to end all deaths or all other deaths but one, his face was destroyed by its display. His casket was opened, his face was shown, is seen—now in the photograph—and allowed to open a revelation that first is manifest in the shudder the shutter continues to produce,10 the trembling, a general disruption of the ways in which we gaze at the face and at the dead, a disruption of the oppressive ethics and coercive law of reckless eyeballing, reckless whistling, which contains within it a call, the disruption of the disruption that would have captured, an arrest of the spirit that arrests, a repetitive close. Memory—bound to the way the photograph holds up what it proposes, stops, keeps—is given pause, because what we thought we could look at for the last time and hold holds us, captures us, and doesn’t let us go. And why is the memory of this mutilated face, reconfiguration of what was embedded in some furtive and partial glance’s refusal, so much more horrible, the distortion magnified even more than the already incalculable devastation of the actual body? Does the blindness held in the aversion of the eye create an insight that is manifest as a kind of magnification or intensification of the object—as if memory as affect and the affect that forges distorted or intensified memory cascade off one another, each multiplying the other’s force? I think this kind of blindness makes music. The fear of another castration is all bound up in this aversion of the eye. Emmett Till’s death marks a double time, rhythm-a-ning, redoubled nothing-ing, dead and castrated. But his mother, absent, present, reopens or leaves open the wound that is redoubled, the nothing that is redoubled in her son’s murder. Ms. Bradley opens, leaves open, reopens, the violent, ritual, sexual cutting of his death by the leaving open of the casket, by the unretouching of the body, by the body’s photograph, by the photograph’s transformation in memory and nightmare of which many speak (for instance, Roland Barthes, about whom more later). That leaving open is a performance. It is the disappearance of the disappearance of Emmett Till that emerges by way of exhibiting what Mackey calls “wounded kinship” (itself always refigured and refinished in and as and by exogamous collision). It is the ongoing destruction of the ongoing production of (a)

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(black) performance, which is what I am, which is what we are or could be if we can listen while we look. If he seems to keep disappearing as we look at him, it’s because we look away, which is what makes possible and impossible representation, reproduction, dream. And there is a sound that seemingly is not there in this performance, which this performance is about; but not just a sound, since also we are concerned with what that sound would invoke—immortal or utopian longings, though not the utopianism of a past made present, not the recovery of a loss, and not just a negation of the present either, in the form of an ongoing displacement of the concrete. Rather, here is an abundance—in abundance—of the present, an abundance of affirmation in abundance of the negative, in abundance of disappearance. Such is the aesthetic cut, invasive evasion, shock of the shock, adding form and color to a verbal discourse, adding extensional cry and sound to the word’s visualization. An image from which one turns is immediately caught in the production of its memorialized, re-membered reproduction. We lean into it, but we can’t; the aesthetic and philosophical arrangements of the photograph—some organizations of and for light—anticipate a looking that cannot be sustained as unalloyed looking but must be accompanied by listening, and this, even though what is listened to—echo of a whistle or a phrase, moaning, mourning, desperate testimony, and flight—is also unbearable. These are the complex musics of the photograph. This is the sound before the photograph: Scream inside and out, out from outside, of the image. Bye, baby. Whistling. Lord, take my soul. Redoubled and reanimating passion, the passion of a seeing that is involuntary and uncontrollable, a seeing that redoubles itself as sound, a passion that is the redoubling of Emmett Till’s passion, of whatever passion would redeem, crucifixion, lynching, middle passion, passage. So that looking implies that one desires something for this photograph. So that mourning turns. So that the looker is in danger of slipping, not away, but into something less comfortable than horror—aesthetic judgment, denial, laughter, some out and unprecedented reflection, movement, murder, song. So that there is an inappropriable ecstatics that goes along with this aesthetics—one is taken out, as in screams, fainting, tongues, dreams. So perhaps she was counting on the aesthetic.

This aural aesthetic is not the simple reemergence of the voice of presence, the visible and graphic word. The logos that voice implies and requires has been complicated by the echo of transgressive whistle, abortive seduction, stuttered leave-taking, and by reconstructive overtones of mo’nin’. Something is remembered and repeated in such complications. Transferred. To move or work through that something, to improvise, requires thinking

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about morning and how mourning sounds, how moaning sounds. What’s made and destroyed. We’ll have to do this while keeping in mind all that remains urgent and needful and open in the critique of phonologocentrism, which Jacques Derrida initiates. Nevertheless, we’ve got to cut the ongoing “reduction of the phonic substance,” whose origin is untraceable but is at least as old as philosophy, at least as old as its paradoxically interinanimate other, phonocentrism, and predates any call for its being set into motion, either in Descartes or Saussure or in Derrida’s critical echo of them.11 The refusal to neutralize the phonic substance of the photograph rewrites the time of the photograph, the time of the photograph of the dead. The time of the sound of the photograph of the dead is no longer irreversible, no longer vulgar, and, moreover, is indexed not only to rhythmic complication but to the extreme and subtle harmonics of various shrieks, hums, hollers, shouts, and moans. What these sounds and their times indicate is the way into another question concerning universality, a reopening of the issue of a universal language by way of this new music so that now it’s possible to accommodate a differentiation of the universal, of its ongoing reconstruction in sound as the differential mark, divided and abundant, dividing and abounding. But how many people have really listened to this photograph? Hieroglyphics, phonetic writing, phonography— where is the photograph placed in all this? Black mo’nin’ is the phonographic content of this photograph. And the whistle is just as crucial as the moan; train whistle, maybe; his whistle carrying the echo of the train that took his particular origins north, the train that brought him home and took him home and brought him home. There’s a massive itinerancy here, a fugitivity that breaking only left more broke, broken and unbroken circle of escape and return.12 And the gap between them, between their modes of audibility vis-à-vis the photograph, is the difference within invagination between what cuts and what surrounds, invagination being that principle of impurity, which, for Derrida, marks the law of the law of genre where the set or ensemble or totality is constantly improvised by the rupturing and augmentative power of an always already multiply and disruptively present singularity.13 So that speech is broken and expanded by writing; so that hieroglyphics is affected by phonetic script; so that a photograph exerts itself on the alphabet; so that phonographic content infuses the photo. And this movement doesn’t mark some orbital decay in which signification inevitably returns to some simple vocal presence; rather, it’s the itinerary of the force and movement of signification’s outside. The implications of this aural aesthetic—this phonographic rewriting of/in the photograph—are crucial and powerful, then, because they mark something general about the nature of a photograph and a performance—the ongoing universality of their absolute singularity— that is itself, at least for me, most clearly and generously given in black

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photography and black performance. (This is, for instance, what Mackey always brings, always knows.)

Blackness and maternity play huge roles in the analytic of photography Roland Barthes lays down in Camera Lucida, Barthes’s extended and elegiac meditation on the essence of photography that revolves around an unreproducible, unobservable photograph of his mother as a young child (the “Winter Garden Photograph”), a woman remarkable to Barthes in part because, he says, she made no observations.14 Blackness is the site or mark of the ideal object, the ideal spectator (and these are everything for Barthes’s analytic, since the doing or operation of photography is bracketed and set aside early on in Camera Lucida). Blackness is the embodiment of a naïveté that would move Barthes, the self-styled essential phenomenologist, back before culture to some pure and unalloyed looking.15 The paradox, here, is that the reduction phenomenology desires seems to require a regression to a prescientific state characterized by what Husserl, after Hegel, would call the incapability of science. Those who are incapable of science are those who are outside history, but that exteriority is precisely the desired starting point for phenomenology that would move not through philosophical tradition but directly toward and in the things themselves. And indeed, this is how empire makes phenomenology possible, figuring a simplicity structured by regression, return, and reduction refigured as refinement. Empire’s mother fixation is phenomenology’s obsession with blackness. Blackness is situated precisely at the site of the condition of possibility and impossibility of phenomenology, and for Barthes that’s cool, because the object and the spectator of photography reside there as well. This interstitial no-space is where photography lives, this point of embarkation for the europhallic journey to the interior, to the place of the other, the dark continent, the motherland that is always coded as an imperial descent into self. This regressive return to “that-has-been” and/or to where-you-been is the staging area for the performance of that wounded kinship and violent collision that is both the life-drama-trauma of blackness and the opening of what is called modernity.16 The lynching and photographing of Emmett Till, the reproductive display of his photographed body by his mother, the Barthesian theory of photography that is founded in part on a silencing invocation of that mother and of him are all part of the ongoing production of that performance. It ought not be surprising, then, that Barthes’s analysis in Camera Lucida is structured by a set of problematic moves: a disavowal of the historical in photography that reduces it to a field of merely “human interest”; a figuring of photographic historicality as overwhelmed by that univocal intentionality of the photographer that can result only in “a kind of general enthusiastic commitment . . . with-

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out special acuity,”17 an ontological differentiation between photography and the photograph, and a semiotic neutralization of the unorderable or unmeaningful phonic substance of photography. It is especially the first and last of these elements that emerge here: The photograph is unary when it emphatically transforms “reality” without doubling it, without making it vacillate (emphasis is a power of cohesion): no duality, no indirection, no disturbance. The unary Photograph has every reason to be banal, “unity” of composition being the first rule of vulgar (and notably, of academic) rhetoric: “The subject,” says one handbook for amateur photographers, “must be simple, free of useless accessories; this is called the Search for Unity.” News photographs are very often unary (the unary photograph is not necessarily tranquil). In these images, no punctum: a certain shock but no disturbance; the photograph can “shout,” not wound. These journalistic photographs are received (all at once), perceived. I glance through them, I don’t recall them; no detail (in some corner) ever interrupts my reading: I am interested in them (as I am interested in the world), I do not love them.18

Barthes’s turn from the vulgar, unary photography of the shout and toward the refined photography of the prick or wound is tied to an ontological questioning that is founded on the unreproducibility of a photograph and the theological veiling of the original in the interest of a theory of photographic signification.19 Against the backdrop of Emmett Till, the silencing of a photograph in the name of that interstitial space between the Photograph and Photography is also the silencing dismissal of a performance in the name of that interstitial space between Performance and Performativity. And, again, paradoxes are here produced seemingly without end, so that Barthes’s critique of the unary photograph is based on the assumption of the unary sensuality of photography. And this is a prescriptive assumption—photography ought to be sensually unary, ought not shout so that it can prick. Wounding photography is absolutely visual; that’s the only way we can love it. So what’s the relationship between the necessary presence of the interinanimation of naïve blackness and preobservational motherhood in Barthes’s theory and the necessary absence of sound? Perhaps it is this: that the necessary repression—rather than some naturalized absence—of phonic substance in a general semiotics applies to the semiotics of photography as well; that the semiotic desire for universality, which excludes the difference of accent by excluding sound in the search for a universal language and a universal science of language, is manifest in Barthes as the exclusion of the sound/shout of the photograph; and that, in the fundamental methodological move of what-has-been-called-enlightenment, we see the invocation of a silenced difference, a silent black materiality, in order to justify a suppression of difference in the name of (a false) universality.

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In the end, though, neither language nor photography nor performance can tolerate silence, which is to say that the universalities these names would mark exist only in the singularities of a language, a photograph, a performance, singularities that cannot live in the absence of sound. Repressed accent returns precisely in the doubling that these things require, that the theory of these things demands, so that sound and recording are fundamentally connected in their disruptive necessity to language, photography, and performance. If Barthes had really consulted her, Ms. Bradley might have said all this; this aural aesthesis is what she counts on to intensify the politics of the performance whose production she extends. The meaning of a photograph is cut and augmented by a sound or noise that surrounds it and pierces its frame. And if, as Barthes suggests, that meaning or essence or noeme is death, the “that-has-been of the photographic object,” then sound disturbs it in the interest of a resurrection. The content of the music of this photograph, like that of black music in general according to Baraka, is life, is freedom. The music and theater of a black photograph is erotic: the drama of life in the photograph of the dead. So what’s the difference between the son’s inability to reproduce the photograph of his dead mother and the mother’s insistence on the reproduction of the photograph of her dead son? The difference has to do with distinguishable stances toward universality, with what the discovery of a performance or a photograph has to do with universality, with the meaningful and illusory difference and relation between Performance and Performativity, the Photograph and Photography. If “the Winter Garden Photograph was indeed essential, it achieved for [Barthes], utopically, the impossible science of the unique being.”20 This impossible science, the unique and universal word or logos, is achieved only in a kind of solipsism, only in the memory that activates the unique photograph’s capacity to wound. Meanwhile, Ms. Bradley sidesteps (by way of an insistent publicity wherein is carried the echo of whistling and mo’nin’, in the interest of getting to some other—which is to say real—place) the utopic intersection of hermeneutics, phenomenology, and ontology that mark the origin and limit of Barthes’s desire. For Barthes the inability and/or unwillingness to discover a photograph is driven by the positing of a universality and singularity that can only be mourned; for Ms. Bradley the discovery of a photograph in the fullness of its multiple sensuality moves in the drive for a universality to come, one called by what is in and around the photograph—black mo’nin’.

About twenty-five years before Camera Lucida, in an essay called “The Great Family of Man,”21 Barthes makes some assumptions in the form of a question regarding what “the parents of Emmet [sic] Till, the young Negro

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assassinated by the Whites”22 would have thought about the Great Family of Man and the celebrated traveling photographic exhibition called The Great Family of Man. He uses those assumptions to argue for the necessity for progressive humanism of an ongoing historicization of nature rather than an uncritical photo-affirmation of certain universal facts such as birth and death. After all, he writes, “to reproduce death or birth tells us, literally, nothing. For these natural facts to gain access to a true language, they must be inserted into a category of knowledge which means postulating that one can transform them, and precisely subject their naturalness to our human criticism.”23 Indeed, for Barthes, the failure of such photography lies in its inability to show whether or not the child is born with ease or difficulty, whether or not his birth causes suffering to his mother, whether or not he is threatened with a high mortality rate, whether or not such and such a future is open to him: this is what your exhibition should be telling people, instead of an eternal lyricism of birth. The same goes for death: must we really celebrate its essence once more, and thus risk forgetting that there is still so much we can do to fight it? It is this very young, far too young power that we must exalt, and not the sterile identity of “natural” death.24

At the end of his career, however, Barthes produced a text that requires that we ask how a critique of the suppression of the determining weight of history is left behind for a stance that is nothing if not ahistorical. Where history and that singularity that exists as a function of depth/interiority, a certain incursion into the interior of the photograph and of identity, merge in “The Great Family of Man,” history and singularity are reconfigured each in relation to the other in Camera Lucida. There, history exists only in relation to the sovereign ego that is given and represented by the wounding, arresting force of the photographic punctum, the placement of the interiority of a subject on endless trial.25 Where difference was once tied to the historical injustices it both structures and is structured by, now it marks only the uniqueness of an ego, is “that time when we were not born,”26 or, more particularly, “the time when my mother was alive before me.”27 And, indeed, the representation of injustice, of historical alienation, is now configured only as banality. This configuration marks the return, paradoxically, of an empty humanism of death (and birth) that elsewhere and earlier Barthes had critiqued. The photograph as such is now just the universal visual fact of death, of pastness, of that-has-been, of the essence or noeme of photography, which, again, is the object of Barthes’s analytic desire. On the other hand, a photograph will remain, for him, not invisible but simply unreproducible. The fundamental absence of depth, held now in the very form of the print, allows only the sad gesture of turning the photograph over. The appeal to the possibility of a particular identity’s historical ma-

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teriality is transformed into the flat memorialization of the photograph’s tain. This analytic is shaped by the recrudescence of that humanism that marks what Louis Althusser called “the international of decent feelings,”28 though here feeling is numbed by a violent egocentrism; an intensely melancholic phenomenology of photography emerges from that egocentrism, one in which what might be called the loss of historical particularity or of the particularity of a photograph is displaced by the loss of the desire for these objects and for the object as such. But there is already something amiss in “The Great Family of Man,” an opposition between the modes of production of the human and human essence that is precisely what Ms. Bradley cuts. It is the split in which totality is (a)voided in the interest of historical particularity, and it is displaced, in Camera Lucida, by a reified ontological concern with studium/punctum, a phenomenological privileging of essence that reveals history to be fundamentally personal, fundamentally deictic, and thus still forecloses not only the totality Barthes already disavows in the earlier text but also the singularity he desires in the later one. In other words, historical particularity becomes what Bertrand Russell would have called egocentric particularity. So this is about how listening carefully to the muted sound of the photograph as it resonates in Barthes’s texts on photography, through his repression and denigration of it, gives us some clues about the inevitability of a certain development in which egocentrism and ontologism, perhaps each to the other’s regret, are each tied to the other in theory, which is to say, in epistemologies of unalloyed looking. And perhaps whatever speech and writing come after or over a photograph or a performance should deal with this epistemological and methodological problem: how to listen to (and touch, taste, and smell) a photograph or a performance, how to attune oneself to a moan or shout that animates the photograph with an intentionality of the outside. Barthes is interested in, but, by implication, does not love, the world. The shout that structures and ruptures the photograph of Emmett Till with a piercing historicality, that resingularizes and reconstructs his broken body, emerges from love, from a love of the world, from a specific political intention. When Barthes invokes Ms. Bradley in a critique of the naturalistic and universalizing photography of the bare fact of death but fails to recognize her own photographic contribution to that critique, he betrays a quite specific inability that will be fully activated years later in another discourse on photography that is equally dependent on black images.

Of course, Emmett Till’s death (which word wrongs him and her) was not natural, and the photograph shows this. It shows this and the death’s difficulty, the suffering of the mother, the threat of a high mortality rate, and

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the seemingly absolute closure of his future. But it does so not by way of an erasure of lyricism or even of “the natural,” for these reemerge, by way of an unbearable and vicious dialectic, in the photograph’s music. Barthes’s question was only rhetorical, though. He didn’t really ask Ms. Bradley what she thought. She told us anyway. And so this photograph—or, more precisely, the natural and unnatural fact that is photographed and displayed— cannot simply be used as an inarticulate denial of an always and necessarily false universality. For it is in the name, too, of a dynamic universality (which critically moves in, among other things, grief, anger, hatred, the desire to expose and eradicate savagery) whose organization would suspend the condition of possibility of deaths like Emmett Till’s, that the photo was shown, is seen. It is in the interest of a certain defeat or at least deconstruction of death—a resurrective or (second) reconstructive improvisation through death’s pride and through a culture that death drives—that Till’s body was shown, was seen, and that the photograph of Till’s body is shown, is seen. But Barthes wasn’t trying to hear the sound of that display, the sound of the photograph’s illumination of facticity, which holds an affirmation not of, but out of, death. Black Art, which is to say Black Life, which is to say Black (Life Against) Death, which is to say Black Eros, is the ongoing production of a performance: rupture and collision, augmented toward singularity, motherless child, childless mother, heart-rending shriek, levee camp moan, grieving lean and head turn, fall, Stabat mater, turn a step, loose booty funk brush stroke down my cheek, yellow dog, blue trän, black drive. The ways black mo’nin’ improvises through the opposition of mourning and melancholia disrupt the temporal framework that buttresses that opposition such that an extended, lingering look at—aesthetic response to—the photograph manifests itself as political action. Is the display of the picture melancholic? No, but it’s certainly no simple release or mourning either. Mo’nin’ improvises through that difference. We have to keep looking at this so we can listen to it. So in the name of this bright section of winds, some variations on Alexander’s question: Can we look at this, which is to say can we look at this again (such repetition being a constitutive element of what it means and is to be black)? Can you be black and not look at this (again)? Can we look at this (again) and be black? There is a responsibility to look every time, again, but sometimes it looks as though that looking comes before, holds, replicates, reproduces what is looked at. Nevertheless, looking keeps open the possibility of closing precisely what it is that prompts and makes necessary that opening. But such an opening is only held in looking that is attentive to the sound—and movement, feel, taste, smell (as well as sight): the sensual ensemble—of what is looked at. The sound works and moves not just through but before another movement, a movement that is before

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even that affirmation that Barthes didn’t hear. A photograph was seen, was shown, in a complex path, a dissonant and polyphonic drive. In the death of Emmett Till, insurrection and resurrection are each insistently before the other, waiting for a beginning that is possible only after the experience of all of what is held in the photograph. What is held in a photograph is not exclusive to the photograph, but this photograph moves and works, is shown, was seen, shone, says, is animated, resounds, broken, breaking song of, song for, something before, like the Music, which is, as Mingus says, not just beautiful, but terribly beautiful. So here is the performance I discovered by way of this “legacy of lynchings”: At my aunt Mary’s funeral (she was my favorite aunt, but I was scared to look at her face in the photograph I couldn’t help but look at that they made of her at the funeral home), Ms. Rosie Lee Seals rose up in church, out from the program, and said, “Sister Mary Payne told me that if she died she wanted me to give a deep moan at her funeral.” And, at that moment, in her Las Vegas-from-Louisiana accent, condition of impossibility of a universal language, condition of possibility of a universal language, burying my auntie with music at morning time, where moaning renders mourning wordless (the augmentation and reduction of or to our releasing more than what is bound up in the presence of the word) and voice is dissonanced and multiplied by metavoice, Sister Rosie Lee Seals mo’ned. New word, new world.

NOTES

1. In Thelma Golden, ed., Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994), 91–110. For a more comprehensive account of Till’s murder, the events leading up to it, and its aftermath, see Stephen J. Whitfield, A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988). 2. Nathaniel Mackey, Bedouin Hornbook, Calalloo Fiction Series (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1986), 51–52. 3. Mackey, Bedouin Hornbook, 201–2. 4. Roland Barthes says that “photography has something to do with resurrection.” In this essay I’m trying to extend this assertion by way of, against, and through some of Barthes’s formulations of photography. See his Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 82. More on this text later. 5. Whitfield informs us that “Bobo was self-assured despite a speech defect—a stutter—that was the consequence of nonparalytic polio that he had suffered at the age of three.” See Whitfield, A Death in the Delta, 15, and note, also, Whitfield’s documentation of Ms. Bradley’s argument that the attribution to Till of an attempted transgressive, transracial seduction on the part of his murderers was in part

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the function of their inability to decipher Till’s broken speech. See also Mackey’s “Cante Moro” (in Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies, ed. Adalaide Morris [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997], 194–212) for more on the enabling disabilities of “crippled speech,” its relation to referents unavailable to moaning’s or humming’s cutting augmentation of the verbal. 6. Whitfield, A Death in the Delta, 15. 7. Julia Kristeva works fruitfully in the field determined by the opposition of mimesis and analytic-interpretive knowledge. I want to acknowledge that work here as well as the necessity for a full account of that work. That necessity is particularly pronounced in work that is, on the one hand, attuned to the encountering of maternity and phonic materiality in a way that is very much influenced by Kristeva and, on the other hand, driven by an engagement with Barthes at a moment in his career when the influence of Kristeva is especially evident in his work. I intend to provide such an account very soon. Meanwhile, Kristeva speaks very lucidly on the relation between mimesis and knowledge in “A Conversation with Julia Kristeva,” in Julia Kristeva: Interviews, ed. Ross Mitchell Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 31. 8. I want to acknowledge, here, the work of Karen Sackman on the relation between overtone and political mobilization. The chance to discuss these matters with her was crucial to the development of my ideas in this essay. I should say, too, that our discussion was prompted in large part by Randy Martin’s extraordinary book Critical Moves (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998). 9. Amiri Baraka, “When Miles Split!” in Eulogies (New York: Marsilio Publishers, 1996), 145–46. 10. There is more to be said elsewhere regarding the photographic apparatus, the production of a sound that allows the production of an image. Thanks to my colleague Barbara Browning for opening this up. 11. See Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakrovarty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). 12. Mackey speaks, with regard to Baraka and his reading and rewriting of García Lorca in the late 1950s and early 1960s, of “a well-known, resonant history of African-American fugitivity and its well-known, resonant relationship to enslavement and persecution.” He adds, “The way in which fugitivity asserts itself on an aesthetic level . . . is important as well. The way in which Baraka’s poems of this period move intimates fugitive spirit, as does much of the music that he was into. He writes of a solo by saxophonist John Tchicai on an Archie Shepp album, ‘It slides away from the proposed.’ . . . That sliding away wants out.” See Mackey, “Cante Moro,” 200. 13. Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” in On Narrative, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 55. 14. Barthes associates the state, shall we say, of having made no observations with kindness: In this little girl’s image I saw the kindness which had formed her being immediately and forever, without her having inherited it from anyone; how could this kindness have proceeded from the imperfect parents who had loved her so badly—in short: from a family? Her kindness was specifically out-of-play, it belonged to no system, or at least it was located at the limits of a morality (evangelical, for instance); I could not define it

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better than by this feature (among others): that during the whole of our life together, she never made a single “observation.” This extreme and particular circumstance, so abstract in relation to an image, was nonetheless present in the face revealed in the photograph. (Barthes, Camera Lucida, 69)

It remains for us to think of the consequences, beyond all of what might be seen as admirable or lovable, of the placement, by and in relation to Barthes (himself figured earlier in his own text as a definite sentimental and theoretical observer), of this idealized preobservationality. 15. This is all to say that ultimately what remains constant in Barthes’s thinking on photography is the use of the black example. And one must think hard about what that allows him to do; it’s neither liberal acknowledgement nor petty racist invocation/dismissal, though that’s the trajectory his use takes, and we could talk about that as well. Ask the North African workers of the Goutte d’Or district of Paris. Ask the parents of Emmett Till. OK. 16. On “that-has-been,” see Barthes, Camera Lucida, 76–77. 17. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 26. 18. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 40. 19. On the photography of the prick or wound, see Barthes, Camera Lucida, 25– 28. 20. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 71; emphasis in original. 21. Roland Barthes, “The Great Family of Man,” in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 101–3. 22. Barthes, “The Great Family of Man,” 101. 23. Barthes, “The Great Family of Man.” 24. Barthes, “The Great Family of Man,” 102. 25. In The Threshhold of the Visible World (and here I thank David Eng for bringing this to my attention), Kaja Silverman looks at Barthes’s distinction between the wounding effect of the punctum and the normative “‘voice’ of ‘knowledge’ and ‘culture’” with which he associates the studium. Silverman cogently critiques Barthes’s valorization of and failure to displace the ego, noting “the limited nature of the gains to be realized when [Barthes’s] revisionary act of looking does not involve at the same time a realignment of self and other.” She adds, “One is left with the disquieting sense that whereas Barthes consistently apprehends the photographs about which he writes from a viewing position which is radically divergent from that indicated by the metaphoric geometral point (associating an African American woman, for instance, with his aunt), his own sovereignty vis-à-vis the object remains unquestioned.” Ultimately, as Silverman claims, “the figures depicted in the photograph serve only to activate [Barthes’s] own memories, and so are stripped of all historical specificity. Barthes’s recollections might thus be said to ‘devour’ the images of the other.” The simultaneously lost and operative singularity that Barthes grieves for is his own. And the problem, here, is not the loss of the object that was there but the never having been there of Barthes’s own absolutely singular objectlessness. Again, Silverman’s formulations here seem absolutely correct. I would only augment them in the following way. (1) The refusal or inability to displace the sovereign ego is not only a failure to realign self and other but also a failure to realign the individual

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and the collective, so that the repression of difference is also the repression of a certain ensemblic publicity that is activated in and as sound, where sound is irreducible to voice and, thus, to the meanings that compose dominant culture and knowledge. (2) The devouring of the images of the other in which Barthes engages is, in some ways, a predictable effect of the specific theory of history that animates Barthes’s ahistoricism. The discourse of slave narrative, for instance, is massively infused with examples of the submission of black bodies to a scopic regime that has, as one of its effects, the renewal, if not instantiation, of white interiority. This process is no less pronounced for the development of that white interiority that is identified as radically divergent (from the metaphoric geometral point or from the political and/or aesthetic norms that are associated with that geometral point) or avantgarde. This is not to say that it is not surprising that Barthes associates an African American woman with his aunt; it is to say that it is also not surprising that Barthes makes such an association. I will try to say more about how such interiority as that of Barthes is possible only in contradistinction to that incapability of science or theory, that inability to make— or lack of concern with making—observations, that interminably looked-at failure to look, that specifically black phonic materiality that marks, if you will, the return of the repressed studium in the punctum, in short that presubjective position outside history that has been associated with the African with equal vigor in valorizations of tradition, on the one hand, and discontinuity, on the other. As I imply here and elaborate below, a fuller attempt to move past such a structure would require an attunement not only to the ways in which the aesthetics of black spectatorship and audition as black performance is tied to a general phonography of the photograph, but also to how that complex is, in turn, tied to an improvisation through the opposition of interiority and ensemblic publicity. Of course, Silverman’s work—including especially The Acoustic Mirror (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), her wary critique of the phallocratic deployment of what she understands to be a degrading reduction of feminine voice to feminine scream in classic cinema—is very useful to such a project. See Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996), 180–85. 26. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 64. 27. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 65. 28. Louis Althusser, “The International of Decent Feelings,” in The Spectre of Hegel, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (New York: Verso, 1997), 21–35.

Mark Sanders

Ambiguities of Mourning Law, Custom, and Testimony of Women before South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission No justice—let us not say no law and once again we are not speaking here of laws— seems possible or thinkable without the principle of some responsibility, beyond all living present, within that which disjoins the living present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead, be they victims of wars, political or other kinds of violence, nationalist, racist, colonialist, sexist, or other kinds of exterminations, victims of the oppressions of capitalist imperialism or any of the forms of totalitarianism. jacques derrida, Specters of Marx

Currently winding down its work of hearing testimony to human rights abuses of the apartheid era, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is an ambitious undertaking. A counterpart to the Reconstruction and Development Programme, a long-term scheme for the creation of housing, infrastructure, and jobs, the Truth Commission is part of a vast effort at nation-building in postapartheid South Africa. By asking South Africans to remember, the Truth Commission seeks to come to terms not only with the crimes of the apartheid era but also with a 350-year history of white domination. In the words of Justice Richard Goldstone, former United Nations chief prosecutor for war crimes tribunals in Yugoslavia and Rwanda, “One of the most important advantages of the TRC [is] that it w[ill] write the past forever into South Africa’s history.”1 The Truth Commission aims at what no program of reconstruction and development could achieve by material means alone. In the minds of its proponents, it aims at nothing less than the “cleans[ing]” and “moral and cultural reconstruction” of a society.2 It has as its goal the “healing of a nation” socially and psychically sundered into fragments by apartheid.3 By what means does the commission set out to realize its goals? Though its goals are ambitious, its means are seemingly modest. It builds no houses, electrifies no townships, and creates no jobs. Guided by the goal of national reconciliation, all it has done is solicit the truth from witnesses called upon 77

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to provide information that could aid it in its goal of “establishing as complete a picture as possible of the causes, nature and extent of the gross violations of human rights” of the period 1960 to 1994.4 The commission seeks to bring forward, as it distinguishes them, the “victims” as well as the “perpetrators.” In terms of a controversial provision designed to bring to light what court cases would be likely to obscure, “perpetrators” applying to the Amnesty Committee can exchange a “full disclosure” of rights violations for amnesty from criminal and civil prosecution.5 In order to qualify for amnesty, “the act, omission or offence . . . to which the application relates [must be] an act associated with a political objective committed in the course of the conflicts of the past,” and the committee must assess “the relationship between the act, omission or offence and the political objective pursued, and in particular the directness and proximity of the relationship and the proportionality of the act, omission or offence.”6 Although the amnesty hearings have at times been marred by the delaying tactics of lawyers, a great deal of information about covert security operations has come before the public eye. What has captured the hearts of observers, though, is the testimony heard at the human rights violation hearings. As Antjie Krog writes, looking back: “The last victim hearings finished five months ago, and the focus has been lost. No more the voices, like a leaking tap in the back of your mind, to remind you what this Commission is all about.”7 A nationwide publicity drive, supported by church, community, and support groups such as the Johannesburg-based Khulumani (Let us speak out!), has encouraged ordinary people to come forward to name their torturers, to seek the killers of their children, and to claim recompense. We are witnessing, as Kendall Thomas writes, “the elaboration of a new social ethics of discourse.”8 The process of testifying is an open one, with public hearings broadcast live on radio (the mass medium accessible to the largest number of South Africans), and is reported regularly by South African Broadcasting Corporation television, both live and in a weekly wrap-up, Truth Commission Special Report. This openness distinguishes the Truth and Reconciliation Commission from most truth commissions to date.9 Many victims have come forward. Some find the process helpful. Others do not: recalling and reenacting old traumas is not of benefit to all. Leaving the representations of “perpetrators” for another occasion, I concentrate here on the testimony of people who come forward as victims. A final report has been tabled from the representations of perpetrators and victims. Its intention is to present, with the aid of prefatory material, a historical context in which to interpret these testimonies. With this report, submitted to President Nelson Mandela in October 1998, the commission has given official imprimatur to what was in many cases surmised and circulated as common knowledge. For instance, everyone knows that Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko was murdered while in police detention,

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but not everyone, particularly among whites, has wanted to believe it. The same is true for a number of the other high-profile cases. But, more than this, the stories of ordinary women and men have been acknowledged for the first time. Eventually, if it succeeds in the long run, with the aid of the electronic and print media the commission will have performed a necessary and impossible feat; it will, in a future-perfect that molds a past that never was from memory scarcely shared, have formed the country’s fragmented “collective memory” into a shared national history. This will not be a history of bare facts but, at a crucial level, a history judged, and thus shaped, according to norms of universal human rights. Speaking as a witness before the commission thus implies being enjoined to frame one’s testimony according to the demands of universal human rights. As a perpetrator or a victim, one testifies to a transgression of human rights: either one has violated those of another, or one’s own have been violated. Soliciting testimony in this way makes apparent ambiguities in cases that do not fit, in an obvious way, into the paradigm of human rights guiding the commission’s work. The cases I have in mind involve the interface between universal human rights and assertions in the name of “custom” by witnesses to human rights violations. Appeals for funeral rites, invitations to join in the work of mourning, these cases reveal at once a disjuncture and a conflation of law and custom. In British-ruled colonial Africa, custom and law were disjoined at the basis of a system of “indirect rule,” which operated to exclude colonized people from legal and political universality by confining them to a sphere of rule by customary chiefs, where they were denied the rights of members of the colonial civil society. Postapartheid South Africa shares such a legacy with other African countries ruled by Britain. The disjuncture of law and custom also meant their conflation in the form of “customary law.” This colonial invention holds hostage postcolonial efforts, such as Thabo Mbeki’s projected “African renaissance,” at reclaiming an African cultural heritage. To reclaim “custom” in sub-Saharan Africa today is thus not to counter the universal calculus of law and rights in the name of cultural difference10 but rather to negotiate a split within the customary—between custom and “customary law”—which precludes any pure opposition between law and custom, because law itself generates the customary in the form of a system of customary law that contaminates any reclamatory invocation of custom. In a complication exemplary of postcolonial cultural politics in Africa and elsewhere, the “past” to be reclaimed is in part a creature of the colonial formation to be superseded. Concentrating on one of several testimonies laying claim to funeral rites in the name of custom, I show how, exposing the disjuncture and conflation of law and custom, the testimony of black women probes the limits of the commission’s machinery of advocacy. Letting someone speak can amount

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to ventriloquism when the words they use seem to echo the large-scale state projection of a black voice in terms of custom; and customary law, whether invented or not, dictates raced and gendered subordination. Yet, as I shall argue, invoking custom in an arena of human rights, where equal consideration is promised, has the potential to bring the customary to crisis. Implicitly laying claim to legal and political universality, black women render apparent the disjuncture and conflation of custom and law. Above and beyond these particular issues, what an examination of this testimony shows is a responsibility to, and before, the dead or deceased, which is bound into the hearing of another injunction in the law. Although hearkening to something in the law, “custom,” when such responsibility is engaged, may be the name of something heterogeneous to any opposition of law and custom. This responsibility may be what makes for another claim, for the very possibility of making other claims. Addressed to a forum of human rights, the demand for funeral rites—for and before the other—evokes, from the law, another “law,” perhaps that which Derrida gives the name “justice.” Summoned before the dead, the commission at once takes up and forecloses this responsibility. THE BODY

Observers of the human rights violation hearings have been struck by the frequency with which witnesses testifying as victims claim the restitution of a body or of missing body parts. The survivors seek to accord the dead proper funeral rites and to enlist the aid of the commission in doing so.11 Although not anticipated by the commission and not budgeted for, more than fifty bodies, many those of African National Congress guerrillas, have been dug up from pauper’s graves or from unmarked burial on isolated farms.12 There has been some debate about the cultural significance of the demand by witnesses for the bodies of family members. Foreign journalists have insisted on its racial and ethnic specificity.13 The domestic media have, however, been more cautious. Early in the life of the commission, Truth Commission Special Report ran a feature on what it termed the “symbolic reburial” of bodies. Although a white psychologist was interviewed for commentary, all of those presented as approaching the commission for “reburial,” or just to find information, were black.14 In a subsequent program, presenter Max du Preez, a respected leftist Afrikaans journalist, sought to dispel the impression that this was “a black cultural thing.” Featured was the widow of a white farmer who had disappeared without trace one day from his farm, later said to have been killed by guerrillas.15 A good case can be made for such journalistic balance when white South African mourning practices pass as culturally unmarked. Yet, in this instance, du

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Preez’s attempt at balance may obscure the significance of the fact that black witnesses, many of them women, have been the ones to bring the issue of funeral rites to general notice.16 If not culturally unique or specific, their demands are, performatively speaking, quite different. An intriguing instance of testimony, in this respect, is that of Lephina Zondo, mother of Andrew Zondo, an African National Congress guerrilla executed, despite activism on his behalf, for his part in the bombing of a shopping mall in Amanzimtoti in 1985.17 The following is an extract from Lephina Zondo’s response to questions from Alex Boraine, deputy chairperson of the Truth Commission and the commissioner designated to lead her testimony: Lephina Zondo: [ . . . ] There was a lawyer, Bheka, [who] represented him. He came back [and] told us that [Andrew had] been sentenced to death five times because of what he did at Amanzimtoti. They took him to Pretoria, they transferred him to Pretoria. We visited him quite often [there. . . . ] The police arrived at home to tell us that the day has arrived for him to be hanged, and they said we should go and see him. We left as a family . . . we stayed there for a weekend. They said that we can stay in Pretoria but we’ll never see his body. We said: “Yes, that is better. Can you make it possible so that we can see his body?” They said: “No. You will not see his body. You won’t be allowed to see his body. You can go and attend the church service but you will never see the body.” We felt that if we go and don’t see the body because it’s our custom, before a person can be buried we have got to look at him and be sure that it is the right person. And thereafter we came back and they buried him. They said that they would bury him at Mamelodi and they said they would give us a death certificate after that, but we never received any death certificate. There was this heavy burden in our hearts. Why didn’t they give us a death certificate because they already hanged him. They said no, it’s the law, they had to bury him. They said even if we can go we will not see him [. . . . ] Alex Boraine: Don’t . . . don’t rush. When you are ready then you can continue. . . . Is that your full story? Lephina Zondo: Yebo [yes]. Alex Boraine: Thank you. I won’t keep you long because you have carried a very heavy load and you have been very brave. Just one or two short questions [. . . . ] Mrs Zondo, the commission is here to share in your pain and your distress. Is there anything that you would like the commission to do if the commission had the power to do that? Is there anything more you want to say?

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mark sanders Lephina Zondo: I would request [ . . . ] we do not have a death certificate and we cannot go to the place where my son is buried. Alex Boraine: Mrs Zondo, we will certainly consider your request and we will very definitely be able to get hold of the death certificate so that you can have it. We will also make enquiries, I’m really not sure what the law is, but we will make enquiries about your son’s body and we will come back to you and tell you what we have found out. I hand you now over to the chairperson. Lephina Zondo: Thank you very much.18

Lephina Zondo’s testimony is intriguing to read in the context of Max du Preez’s hesitation over the cultural and racial specificity of codes of mourning. She testifies in Zulu—which is translated for Boraine, who puts his questions in English—that the family was never allowed to see the body of their son: “They said: ‘ . . . You will not see his body. You won’t be allowed to see his body.’ ” The Prisons Act of 1959 provides for the “near relatives” of an executed prisoner to arrange his or her burial, under the supervision of the prison authorities. This is a provision implemented at the discretion of the commissioner of prisons. The restitution of the body is, as the act is written, the exception; prisoners’ bodies are legally available to medical schools as cadavers.19 Andrew Zondo’s family did not arrange his burial, and the Reverend Aiken Zondo, Andrew’s father, was not permitted to see his body or to attend the burial arranged by the prison.20 Withholding the corpse, specifically sight of the corpse, represents a disruption of usual funeral rites, of the work of mourning that a family, and community, would customarily carry out. Blocked are the usual affective transactions, what is custom or habit for the family and community to do: “We felt that if we go and don’t see the body because it’s our custom [umkhuba wethu], before a person can be buried we have got to look at him and be sure that it is the right person.”21 The phrase “because it’s our custom” disrupts the syntax of her testimony. It also points beyond the commission’s mandated domain of gross human rights violations. At one level, the phrase is an explanation for Boraine, whom she appears to position as one ignorant of custom. Yet even the prison’s prohibition appears to acknowledge the custom by prohibiting it. Whites are, in this sense, not outside custom. At another level, though, there is the sense that, when she replies, she responds before another authority. There is no doubt that the hearing is set up to learn of rights violations “done to” her or to her son—judicial executions of political prisoners were classed as gross violations22—and that the commissioner asking the questions plays his part as if this were so. There is, however, no reason to assume that the witness is being written by the same script. This is not necessarily a case of subversion. From somewhere in Boraine’s questions

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and prompts comes the call for another response. If Boraine is the other, we could say that this is a call coming from the other of the other. To that other, Lephina Zondo gives the name “custom” and attributes an imperative: “before a person can be buried we have got to look at him and be sure that it is the right person.” Audible somewhere in the soliciting of testimony to human rights violations is the call of custom—here, the imperative to look at the body before its preparation for burial. For this call to be heard and for the response of the witness to be heard as if it had not been heard— that is to say, to be received as testimony only to rights violations—emphasizes, on the one hand, how the commission operates to reveal not just the crimes of apartheid but also the social rifts and fissures left by almost 350 years of colonial and quasi-colonial rule. Tensions at the hearings between custom and rights may, on the other hand, repeat an older hearkening to another authority in, and from within, the law. Such a hearkening would not only complicate negotiations with a colonial legacy disjoining and conflating law and custom and raise questions about customary gender inequality and human rights, but also broach larger matters of responsibility and the very conditions of possibility for the making of other, not yet anticipated, claims. CUSTOM AND THE LAW

Strictly speaking, violations of custom lie beyond the scope of the commission, whose task it is to investigate “gross violations of human rights” through the “killing, abduction, torture or severe ill-treatment of any person.”23 The violation in this case—we are not talking about clandestine “disappearance,” the issue raised with exhumations—is the “legal” denial of customary funeral rites, of the usual process of laying the dead to rest. Though not strictly a “gross violation” of rights,24 such a denial of funeral rites may—at least in “Western” thought25—be the violation of right par excellence. I am thinking of Antigone and the part played by Sophocles’ drama in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. The section “The True Spirit. The Ethical Order” (Der wahre Geist. Die Sittlichkeit), in which Hegel relies on an interpretation of Sophocles, can be read as an allegory of the complicated exchanges before the commission between custom and human rights, exchanges involving at least four languages and several discontinuous histories of translation. Let us explore how this is so. In Sophocles, Antigone questions Creon’s “proclamation” (ke¯rúxas), the “law” (nómos) that prohibits her from burying her brother, Polynices, who has been declared a traitor and punished by being denied the honor of a proper burial.26 For Antigone, Creon’s law (nómos) seeks to “override the gods, / the great unwritten, unshakeable traditions [nómima]” (Theban Plays, ll. 504–5/Antigone, the Women, ll. 454–

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55). Although, as we know, nómos, which can be translated as custom, is typically treated as consistent with law, Antigone’s speech demands that we not simply conflate law and custom, that we not exclaim, all too quickly, that, here, at the navel of Western thought, law is actually at one with custom, united in the sphere of what Hegel refers to as “the human law” (das menschliche Gesetz): “the known law, and the prevailing custom” (das bekannte Gesetz und die vorhandene Sitte).27 Set apart from law (nómos) in Antigone’s speech, the word for “traditions” is nómima: customs, usages. In the Phenomenology, Hegel, to whom modern communitarian political theory owes the determination of law, the family, and the state as moments of the customary—or, as it is usually translated, the “ethical order” or the “ethical life” (Sittlichkeit) —does not oppose law and custom (Gesetz und . . . Sitte).28 Instead he sees a “rift [Zwiespalt] between divine and human law” (Phenomenology, 285, translation modified/Phänomenologie, 350). A translation of nómima as “traditions” or “customs,” however, allows what Hegel renders as “divine law” (göttliches Gesetz) to shade into the customary. Rereading Hegel through Sophocles thus yields not simply a tension between human law as actualized in the state and divine law, but also a rift between what Hegel takes to be at one: civic law and custom. There is a sense in this speech that Antigone hearkens to the other—or others—of the law proclaimed by Creon: the nómima in the nómos. By responding before that authority, she can hold Creon responsible. Since the unwritten nómima prescribe duties toward the dead (and nómima can be rites accorded the dead), to respond before them is also to respond before the dead. This suggests that, as the law speaks, from somewhere within it there is another call. We could follow Derrida and call this responsibility the living assume before the nonliving “justice.” Without forgetting the differences, we can draw striking parallels between Antigone’s challenge to Creon and the testimony of Lephina Zondo—as custom is affirmed, its recognition sought in a forum constituted on the basis of universal human rights. Both a “perpetrator” and a “victim”—to use the parlance of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission—Andrew Zondo is executed for crimes against the state, except that this is a state of which he was, in contrast with the high-born Polynices, in many ways never really a citizen. Having been denied access to the body of their son, the family explains to the prison authorities that it is their custom (umkhuba wethu) to see the body of the deceased. Nómima, custom and funeral rites, custom as funeral rites, have been blocked by what is proclaimed by penal officialdom as nómos: “They said no, it’s the law.” The commission implicitly makes itself available to the witness in a kind of “transference.” The contestatory dialogue with the prison officials between custom and law is recollected and repeated for the commission, and the demand made of the officials is reiterated in the standard “request”

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a witness is called upon to make before it. Testifying to a “legal” denial of funeral rites as a violation of “our custom,” our habit of doing things, Lephina Zondo petitions the commission for concrete means of redress: “I would request . . . we do not have a death certificate and we cannot go to the place where my son is buried.” Enormous differences exist, of course, between what we find in Antigone and in Hegel’s reading, on one hand, and the appeal the Truth Commission hears from Lephina Zondo, on the other. To the more obvious differences of geographical, historical and cultural location, and occasion (quasi-legal hearing, theater), we can add at least two that are more telling. By attending to these differences, we can interrogate Hegel’s appropriation of Antigone and Greek antiquity. Africa, passed over by the world spirit in his Philosophy of History as “the land of childhood . . . enveloped in the dark mantle of Night,”29 may yet teach Hegel something. First, whereas Lephina Zondo appeals on behalf of her son, Antigone claims funeral rites for her brother, a contingent fact (the parents of Antigone and Polynices are dead) that Hegel transposes into the essential brother-sister relation, making it the basis for his determination of “the feminine” (das Weibliche) as an actualization of “divine law” (Phenomenology, 274, 280/Phänomenologie, 336, 343)—and thus, with our retranslation, an actualization of custom. Although ethnography of “traditional” Zulu social formations has revealed women to have the social role of mourners,30 we would not be justified in assuming that a woman who testifies in Zulu before the commission, explaining a custom in order to claim a restitution of her son’s body, does so for such reasons.31 If it is true that, in the aftermath of armed conflict, women are often the survivors (one thinks, for instance, of the Argentinean mothers of the “disappeared”),32 as reportage on the commission and the background to Lephina Zondo’s testimony show, men, as fathers, also play a leading part in the process.33 We would thus be mistaken in identifying customs of mourning with the social role of women; we do not need to imitate Hegel by essentializing from the outlines of a single case or a limited number of cases. Nevertheless, as I shall propose, in the postapartheid juncture, Lephina Zondo’s testimony brings to light considerable implications specific to women. Second, as I have begun to suggest, Hegel implicitly assumes law and custom to coexist amicably within the realm of “the ethical order” or “ethical life” (Sittlichkeit). It is divine law and human law that are in conflict. Hegel’s larger goal, however, is to outline a transition (Übergang) from the family to the state, a transition within an ordinarily cohesive “community” (Gemeinwesen) composed, in effect, of “blood relation[s]” (Blutsverwandten) (Phenomenology, 271, see also 278/Phänomenologie, 333, see also 341). Divine law, in the form of the family, is the motive “element” (Element) of human law and of the state (Phenomenology, 288/Phänomenologie, 352); their coex-

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istence is disrupted only by a deed such as that of Antigone, which sets family against state, divine law against human law—in our translation: custom against civic law. What happens, however, when such cohesive relationships do not exist or when ones that do are unacknowledged or suppressed? When ties of blood invite a phobia ultimately legislated as apartheid?34 When, as in British colonial Africa, colonists enjoy civic law, but the colonized are subject to a codified “customary law,” in what Mahmood Mamdani terms a “bifurcated state”?35 Hegel seems not to anticipate such a situation, one which prevailed in equatorial and southern Africa, attaining its most elaborated form in the “ethnic” Bantustans of apartheid. His account of colonization (Kolonisation) in the Philosophy of Right proceeds exclusively from the standpoint of the (English or Spanish) colonist, who, following an emancipation struggle akin to that of slave and master, merely restarts the familybourgeois society-state teleology on new soil.36 In his reading of Antigone in Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel does not contemplate the possibility of “custom” not being reconcilable with law as actualized in the state. He does not imagine a realm of the “customary,” of Sittlichkeit, being a zone of civic and geographic marginalization.37 If Africa has anything to teach Hegel and Hegelians, the lesson will come from the peculiar place of custom in colonial and postcolonial African modernity. Typically reread in terms of gender, the political dynamics of kinship in Antigone and their place in Hegel can also be read as an allegory of race. In his assessment of postcolonial Africa’s legacy of late colonialism in Citizen and Subject, Mahmood Mamdani identifies as a problem the deracialization of the upper levels of government without a corresponding democratization at the local level. Mamdani traces this problem back to the structure of European colonial rule in Africa, which developed into an amalgam of “direct rule” and “indirect rule”: Debated as alternative modes of controlling natives in the early colonial period, direct and indirect rule actually evolved into complementary ways of native control. Direct rule was the form of urban civil power. It was about the exclusion of natives from civil freedoms guaranteed to citizens in civil society. Indirect rule, however, signified a rural tribal authority. It was about incorporating natives into a state-enforced customary order. Reformulated, direct and indirect rule are better understood as variants of despotism: the former centralized, the latter decentralized. . . . Urban power spoke the language of civil society and civil rights, rural power of community and culture. Civil power claimed to protect rights, customary power pledged to enforce tradition.38

It is clear from this account that, in late colonial Africa, the application of Hegel’s theory of the state meets an obstacle. Whereas, as Hegel tells us, the society of the colonists developed along lines reproducing the dialectic

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of the modern European state, colonized social formations were incorporated into the colonial state in ways that precluded any dialectical relationship between African custom and the realm of civil society and rights.39 Sittlichkeit was torn asunder in colonial Africa, where a domain of custom was mapped out to exclude blacks from the civic freedoms and rights enjoyed as a matter of course by whites. Apartheid was the apotheosis of this bifurcated system. In this bifurcated colonial state, two, unequal, juridical orders existed: “customary justice was dispensed to natives by chiefs and commissioners, black and white; modern justice to nonnatives by white magistrates.”40 The legacy of customary law, when examined historically, is that it is not customary at all, but a subordinate part of the hierarchy of indirect rule. In the same way that African tribes and ethnicity were sometimes “inventions” of missionaries and colonial states, customary law was a brainchild of colonial rule.41 Like postindependence Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and other African countries, postapartheid South Africa has a legacy of “customary law.” First codified in 1878, the body of customary law known as the Natal Code became the law in Zululand in 1887. In 1927, the code became a key part of the blueprint for customary law in the rest of the country, when the Native Administration Act made legal dualism part of a system of territorial segregation and indirect rule on a nationwide scale.42 Never having been applicable to whites, customary law remains a juridical remnant of the almost total exclusion of blacks from the realm of civic rights. Yet, customary law continues to enjoy constitutional recognition, and “traditional leaders” still receive state remuneration. WOMEN AND THE CRISIS OF THE CUSTOMARY

If “custom” marked a racialized zone setting citizen apart from subject, then “customary law” as codified by colonial and apartheid rulers caricatured relations between men and women, as it did other aspects of African life. According to Simons, “[T]he code stereotypes a concept of feminine inferiority unknown to the traditional society.”43 Under the still extant “official code,” women are denied proprietary and contractual capacity, and locus standi in judicio.44 Customary law is thus in conflict with South Africa’s obligations under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and with a constitutional Bill of Rights providing that “[t]he state may not unfairly discriminate directly or indirectly against anyone on one or more grounds, including race, gender, sex, pregnancy, marital status, ethnic or social origin, colour, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, language and birth.”45 Customary law is not always applicable or applied in its “official” form. One can nevertheless observe that, when and where it is so applied, its burdens

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on black women can be onerous. In the realm of the customary, black women are set apart, even more drastically than black men, and thereby denied access to the sphere of civic law and human rights, which, in postapartheid South Africa, promises to include them.46 What does the 1996 constitution say about traditional leaders and customary law? How does it affect black women? “The institution, status and role of traditional leadership, according to customary law, are recognised, subject to the Constitution.”47 Implicitly recognized by this clause is a history of legislative codification and amendment and case law, in which African custom is, as it was under colonialism and apartheid, effectively subject to national lawmakers: “A traditional authority that observes a system of customary law may function subject to any applicable legislation and customs, which includes amendments to, or repeal of, that legislation of those customs.”48 Customary law received constitutional recognition thanks to lobbying by traditional leaders at the multiparty negotiating process, the talks leading to the drafting of a preliminary constitution in 1993. The chiefs attempted to have customary law exempted, as it is from antidiscrimination laws in Zimbabwe,49 from the equality provisions in the Bill of Rights: During the debate on the Bill of Rights in August 1993, a member of one of the traditional leaders’ delegations, Chief Nonkonyana, objected to the equality provisions in the Bill of Rights, stating that, as a traditional leader, he did not support equality for women. The Chief’s demand that customary law be excluded from the Bill of Rights was linked to a second claim for the recognition of the status and powers of traditional leaders. Both of these claims brought the traditional leaders into conflict with women fighting for the principle of gender equality to be entrenched in the interim Constitution.50

The Women’s National Coalition lobbied to ensure that the equality clause in the Bill of Rights included reference not only to race but also to sex. That put them in direct conflict with the chiefs over customary law. In addition to its equality clause, the Bill of Rights recognizes a right to language and culture: “Everyone has the right to use the language and to participate in the cultural life of their choice, but no one exercising these rights may do so in a manner inconsistent with any provision of the Bill of Rights.”51 The clause could, the coalition realized, be interpreted in favor of customary law. Led on this issue by the Rural Women’s Movement, the coalition made the demand that “not only should equality apply to all groups but it should trump claims to culture and custom that justified discrimination against women.”52 Although customary law is “subject to the Constitution,” and the right to language and culture is subject to the Bill of Rights, the effort by the Women’s National Coalition to include an “equality trump” was unsuccessful. Women are left with a constitution that,

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like the salaried traditional leaders who lobby in favor of “customary law,” makes no distinction in terms of status between codified and noncodified versions of customary law. As things stand, constitutional review must decide which aspects of customary law are legitimate. How do the ambiguities for women of the constitutional recognition of custom apply to Lephina Zondo’s testimony? What are the parallels with Antigone? One could object that for a witness to invoke “custom” in testimony before the Truth Commission, a panel based on human rights, is simply retrograde; or, conversely, one could criticize, with Lalu and Harris,53 a legalism that seems to ignore custom, thereby impeding the urgent process of cultural reclamation. Either way, one would operate within an opposition of law and custom. Read another way, testimony such as hers exposes and, as it were, brings to crisis the customary as a structure of social, political, and economic inequality, because she makes her affirmation of “our custom” (umkhuba wethu) in a forum where a request made in its name is, or ought to be, granted equal consideration. A claim made in such a forum would not deprive the claimant of full citizenship, as it might have done under apartheid, and is thus quite distinct from submitting to customary law. Lephina Zondo’s affirmation of custom implies a pragmatics of what, in a different context, Judith Butler describes as a “performative contradiction”54—the claim to equal consideration in “universal” terms to which one has, historically, been denied access. Yet, at the same time, I shall propose, although she testifies to a prohibition that is legal in form, there is a sense in which her affirmation of custom is heterogeneous to the opposition law/custom and to customary law, and thus points at an opening to something other than what can be thought in opposition to the law or, what amounts to the same thing, framed as a claim upon the universality of the law, be it customary or civil. What Lephina Zondo affirms is “our custom” (umkhuba wethu) —our habit, our way of doing things. Contaminated as such affirmations are by a history of manipulation of custom and tradition, hers may have little or nothing to do with customary law.55 Translated as “tradition” or “custom,” the word she uses is not isiko, the synonym usually used when making reference to customary law (umthetho ophathelene namasiko). Provisionally, we can say that, at a political level, those witnesses who claim bodies, and body parts, extend, by their testimony, the human-rights brief of the Truth Commission. Like Chile’s National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation, which distributed its report with a letter from the president to the next of kin of each victim,56 the Truth Commission, even without exhuming bodies, is in effect prepared to join in the work of mourning. This claim-and-response corresponds to the “test[ing] out [of] rights which have not been incorporated in it,” which Claude Lefort sees as characteristic of the democratic state.57 A consideration of claims for funeral rites

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shows that an affirmation of custom does not have to be in conflict with the law, as it is in Antigone and in a more mediated form in Hegel, or with full citizenship, as it often was under colonialism and apartheid. Exceeding the task it was assigned, by helping with the work of mourning, the commission brings to light wider tendencies of social change and deeperrunning fissures in the postapartheid South African polity, not all of which are entirely a legacy of the apartheid era, let alone of the commission’s period of reference. In politics, deracialization will be followed by democratization only if custom, as recognized by the state, is separated fully from customary law and from officially recognized hereditary and patriarchal “traditional leaders.” And only if women are able to affirm custom in ways that do not position them, when they come or are called forth as speaking subjects, as subordinate in systems that deny them full citizenship. It is in this sense that the testimony of Lephina Zondo and others, an assertion of custom at proceedings in which equality of consideration is, or ought to be, operative, can, in this larger context, also be heard as an implicit critique of customary law, in all its forms, and of its specific impact on women. At another level, linking the testimony of Lephina Zondo and other witnesses with the challenge of Antigone is the work of mourning, hearing the other in the law, and the work of mourning as hearing the other in the law. Introducing Antigone, at a tangent to Hegel, we note that the appeal for proper funeral rites does two things: first, it hearkens to an appeal of the other in the other—the other of the law in the law; second, responding to the call of this other—from the place of the deceased—can be read as an instance of responsibility before the dead. This is what Derrida sets forth as a precondition for thinking “justice.” From such elements, seldom produced in legal and political analyses of customary law and human rights, we may be able to formulate another reading of law and custom. When the witness addresses the other in the other, bearing witness to the call of another law and the call of that other law from within the law, there is a response to a law: that of the addressee or addressees.58 Yet there is also a response to the other, or what Lévinas calls the “trace of the other,”59 in the addressee. These dynamics recall to us those of certain testimonial writings—collaborative as well as more strictly autobiographical works—addressed not only to a transcriber and/ or implied reader but at the same time to a figure who is dead.60 Such writings are, as it were, works of mourning. As such testimony challenges the law, bringing it to crisis with its claim, we find revealed, in the possibility of such an other address, the condition of possibility of a challenge or transformative claim as such. Having named the addressee as the dead one, we perceive in such testimony—be it oral or written, heard or read—the instantiation of justice as exceeding, in a relation to the nonliving, the

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calculus of law (in which customary law shares) and rights, and with it determination of custom in opposition to law. In exploring how the testimony of women before the Truth Commission can be read as bringing the customary to crisis, I insisted on the qualification “equality of consideration ought to be operative.” It is here that, as the law is provoked and an alterity is broached, the parallels with Antigone are richest. According to Hegel in the Phenomenology of Spirit, Antigone, as woman, who holds civic law responsible before divine law (which we call nómima), is the “eternal irony of the community” (ewige Ironie des Gemeinwesens) (Phenomenology, 288, translation modified/Phänomenologie, 352). In The Gift of Death, Derrida relates Hegel’s pronouncement to the original Greek sense of irony as eiro¯neía and to the eíro¯n, the dissembler, the one who feigns ignorance in order to make the law speak.61 Recently, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak borrowed from Paul de Man to recast allegory in terms of parabasis, a disruptive and ironic speaking otherwise: “permanent parabasis or sustained interruption from a source relating ‘otherwise’ (allegorein ⫽ speaking otherwise) to the continuous unfolding of the main system of meaning.”62 If Antigone is an eíro¯n, perhaps Lephina Zondo and others asking for funeral rites withheld, affirming custom before the law, are too. Hearkening to a source relating otherwise to the law, to nómima and umkhuba as imperatives of the dead, they make the law speak. They wait for the law to make a response, or rather, perhaps, for the law to convey a response. They want it to speak otherwise. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s founding assumptions about rights violation and reparation have been transformed by the appeals of Lephina Zondo and others for funeral rites. “Transference” has succeeded, yes provisionally substituted for no. As Alex Boraine promises: “Mrs Zondo, we will certainly consider your request and we will very definitely be able to get hold of the death certificate so that you can have it.” Yet when he assures her that the commission “will . . . make enquiries” into whether the family can have access to their son’s body, he tacitly reinvokes the very system of laws that disrupted the customary work of mourning and, with it, responsibility before the dead, in the first place: “I’m really not sure what the law is.”

What will the law say when it speaks? NOTES

The epigraph is from Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), xix.

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1. “TRC Preferable to Trials,” Pretoria News, August 18, 1997, summary in This Week in South Africa: News Highlights from the South African Media (South African Consulate General, New York), August, 19–25, 1997, 4. 2. Frank Chikane, untitled essay in “The Task for Civil Society,” in The Healing of a Nation? ed. Alex Boraine and Janet Levy (Cape Town: Justice in Transition, 1995), 99; Albie Sachs, untitled essay in “The Task for Civil Society,” in The Healing of a Nation? ed. Boraine and Levy, 106. 3. See Boraine and Levy, eds., The Healing of a Nation? 4. Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act, No. 34 of 1995 (South Africa), preamble. The full text of the act is available online: http://www.truth. org.za/legal/act9534.htm (September 29, 2000). A note on the significance of the years beginning and ending the period: In 1960, the declaration of a nationwide state of emergency by H. F. Verwoerd’s National Party government led to a more violent and intense state repression of antiapartheid organizations, including the detention and torture of activists. In 1994, nonracial democratic elections were held for the first time, with an African National Congress majority effectively marking the end of National Party rule and the apartheid era. 5. The amnesty provisions were challenged in the Constitutional Court: Azanian People’s Organisation (Azapo) and Others v. President of the Republic of South Africa and Others, 1996 (4) SA 677 (CC). The judgment in the case is available online: http:// www.truth.org.za/legal/azapo.htm (November 28, 2000). 6. Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act, subsections 3 (1) (b), 20 (1) (b) and 20 (3) (f). 7. Antjie Krog, Country of My Skull ( Johannesburg: Random House, 1998), 236– 37. 8. Kendall Thomas, “Die Verfassung der Amnestie: Der Fall Südafrika,” in Amnestie oder die Politik der Erinnerung in der Demokratie, ed. Avishai Margalit and Gary Smith (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 188. 9. Some witnesses testified publicly before the Argentine National Commission on the Disappeared; Diana Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War” (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 141. The proceedings of the Chilean Commission on Truth and Reconciliation, however, were not public. Krog, Country of My Skull, 238. 10. In countries subject to indirect rule, where custom and customary law are distorted and even invented, cultural affirmation and retrieval are not faced with a straightforward conflict between indigenous custom and universal human rights. In postapartheid South Africa, as in many postindependence African countries, it is not simply a matter of whether to bring local laws and norms into line with international charters. See Abdullahi Ahmed An-Naim, “State Responsibility under International Human Rights Law to Change Religious and Customary Laws,” in Human Rights of Women: National and International Perspectives, ed. Rebecca J. Cook (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 168–88. Neither is it merely a question of whether to resist the tendencies of globalization in the name of cultural difference in order to minimize inroads into national sovereignty by transnational capitalism, which is often heard speaking the language of rights. See Saskia Sassen, Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 88–98; and Pheng Cheah, “Posit(ion)ing Human Rights in

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the Current Global Conjuncture,” Public Culture 9 (1997): 233–66. Just as the complicating legacy of its colonial manipulation cannot lead us to reject the customary outright, the fact that capitalist interests hijack human rights agendas should not lead us to abandon rights, particularly when striking affirmations of the principle of rights—of what Hannah Arendt called “the right to rights”—have come from the formerly colonized and the once enslaved. Such affirmations, inscribed today, for instance, in the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (1981), can be assigned a genealogy dating back at least as far as the San Domingo revolution and Toussaint L’Ouverture’s explosive challenge to the French Revolutionary “Rights of Man and Citizen.” See C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, 2d ed. (New York: Vintage, 1963); and Robin Blackburn, “The French Revolution and New World Slavery,” in Socialism and the Limits of Liberalism, ed. Peter Osborne (London: Verso, 1991), 73–89. 11. Gary Minkley, Ciraj Rassool, and Lesley Witz, “Thresholds, Gateways and Spectacles: Journeying through South African Hidden Pasts and Histories in the Last Decade of the Twentieth Century,” unpublished paper presented at the Conference on the Future of the Past, University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, South Africa, July 10, 1996, 9 ff.; Michael Ignatieff, “Digging up the Dead,” New Yorker, November 10, 1997, 84–93. 12. Krog, Country of My Skull, 204–5; Suzanne Daley, “An Exhumed Body Tells Grim Tales of Apartheid,” New York Times, June 7, 1998, A8. One has often heard the critique that the commission can never bring about national reconciliation by promoting psychic healing, that, if you ask the person in the street, money and land are what is actually wanted. What this well-meaning ventriloquism fails to register is the irreducible contamination of material and psychic reparation and restitution. Exhumation and reburial costs a great deal of money. Yet its motivation is not material but psychic. A node of tension between the affectual and the economic, the body broaches, as it leaves its traces in the language of custom, an ethics reaching beyond material compensation even as it is inextricable from it. 13. “Nason [Ndwandwe] sits in his garage, drinking beer and brooding over what happened. He says, in a hoarse voice, ‘Phila [his daughter] has not been accepted into the fold of the ancestors.’ He has talked to the ancestors to seek their advice. They say that the manner in which she died—so far from home, in such barbarous circumstances, among strangers—means that she cannot come home to her resting place among them. ‘I must cleanse her,’ he says. He must wash the blood from her bones to make her acceptable to the ancestors, and plead, ‘Please accept her.’ Until then, she is wandering alone, above us somewhere, in the humid Durban night” (Ignatieff, “Digging up the Dead,” 87). “In the late afternoon, when the bones [of their son, Bafana Mahlombe] had been placed in a proper coffin, the Mahlombe family said they were finally satisfied. Like many Zulus, they believe that a spirit not put to rest will haunt the family” (Daley, “Exhumed Body”). 14. Truth Commission Special Report, South African Broadcasting Corporation Television, June 16, 1996. 15. Truth Commission Special Report, June 16, 1996. 16. This is implicitly acknowledged by du Preez in his introductory remarks: “Many black mothers and widows have told the Truth Commission that they would only be able to make peace with the loss of their husband or children if they could give them a proper

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burial. Many thought this was a black cultural thing. But this week those at the Truth Commission hearings at Klerksdorp were reminded of how similar we are in our basic emotions” (Truth Commission Special Report, September 29, 1996; first emphasis added). 17. See Fatima Meer, The Trial of Andrew Zondo: A Sociological Insight ( Johannesburg: Skotaville, 1987); and Premesh Lalu and Brent Harris, “Journeys from the Horizons of History: Text, Trial and Tales in the Construction of Narratives of Pain,” Current Writing 8, no. 2 (1996): 24–38. 18. Adapted from the transcript of the translated testimony of Lephina Zondo before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, as recorded by the South African Broadcasting Corporation, Durban, May 10, 1996; reproduced in Lalu and Harris, “Journeys from the Horizons of History,” 30–32, translation modified. A note on the ellipses: The unbracketed ellipses indicate those found in Lalu and Harris; the bracketed ellipses are those made additionally by me. The official transcript, which differs slightly from that in Lalu and Harris, and in which Lephina Zondo is referred to as Lupina Nozipho Zondo, is available at the Truth Commission’s web site: http:// www.truth.org.za/hrvtrans/HRVDURB1/durban4.htm (November 28, 2000). 19. According to the Prisons Act 1959, section 35: (4) (a) The body of an executed person may, in the discretion of the Commissioner, be placed under the control of an inspector of anatomy to be dealt with in accordance with the provisions of the Anatomy Act, 1959 (Act No. 20 of 1959), or be handed over to a medical school which is legally entitled to be in possession of human corpses. (b) If such a body is not disposed of under paragraph (a) it shall in the discretion of the Commissioner be buried in private, either by the authorities of the prison where the execution took place, or by the near relatives of the deceased under the supervision of the said authorities, and in either case the Commissioner may in his discretion permit near relatives of the deceased to be present at the burial.

Quoted in M. A. Rabie and S. A. Strauss, Punishment: An Introduction to Principles, 3d ed. ( Johannesburg: Lex Patria, 1981), 125. 20. Meer, Trial of Andrew Zondo, 170: Aiken had thought he would remain until the day of the execution and he had thought that he would be allowed to say a prayer over his grave. But in the little office, in the prison, the warder told him; “He will be executed on Tuesday. You can’t see him after the execution. The prison will hold a service for ten to fifteen minutes. Then his body will be taken to the graveyard. You can buy a small bouquet and leave it here. We will put it on his coffin. If you want to see the coffin, you can see the coffin but you cannot see your son in the coffin.” Aiken listened and the pain was so intense in his heart that he thought it would squeeze dead. His eyes closed a moment and when he opened them, they were mercifully dry. “If I want to see a coffin, I can go to Doves funeral undertakers.” He left the prison. He did not stay till Tuesday as he had planned to. Instead he left for Durban by bus.

21. I would like to thank Lynette Hlongwane for her assistance with the original Zulu of Lephina Zondo’s testimony. I cite here the unedited South African Broadcasting Corporation videotape of the Durban hearing of May 10, 1996. The translator renders “umkhuba wethu” as “our tradition,” which loses the ordinary, everyday senses of umkhuba as “conduct,” “habit,” and so on. Custom perhaps retains this sense,

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without doing away with ambiguous connotations—of colonial manipulation and even “invention”—which it shares with “tradition” in the Southern African context. 22. Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report (Cape Town: Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 1998), 2: 169 ff. Eugenia Thandiwe Piye, who is the next witness after Lephina Zondo, also testifies to the execution of her son, Lucky Piye. She refers to and corroborates Lephina Zondo’s testimony: “We didn’t go to the graveyard where he was buried. As Mama has already said they wouldn’t let us go. Those people who were with told us that we will not see him—that we will never see them. We asked them even if we couldn’t see him in his coffin. We stayed at the hospital at Mamelodi. We used to go to Mamelodi and stay there. We stayed there the whole day and we eventually realised that they had buried them and we had to go back. We never saw their graveyard where they had been buried. We were never even given their death certificate.” Transcript available online: http://www.truth.org.za/hrvtrans/ HRVDURB1/durban4.htm (November 28, 2000). 23. Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act, subsection 1 (1) (ix) (a). 24. The commission’s report tables, as a “category . . . not defined as a gross violation,” that of “associated violation.” Included in that category is: “Body of victim violated after death, for example by improper burial, body mutilated or burnt or blown up, funeral restrictions, funeral disruption, anonymous burial, mass grave.” Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report, 5: 15, 22. 25. A useful way to think of the relation of Greece and the “West” is as an appropriation of a hybrid Greek antiquity for the purposes of “Western” cultural, national, and racial self-assertion in Europe and the United States. As recent debates over Martin Bernal’s Black Athena and over African American appropriations of Egypt and Greece have revealed, there are other historical possibilities. Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, 2 vols. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987–91); Mary R. Lefkowitz and Guy MacLean Rogers, eds., Black Athena Revisited (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). There are ways in which Greek thought can be opened to dialogue rather than proscribed, which is simply a legitimation, by reversal, of its Western appropriation. As A. A. Mazrui writes: “Europe’s title to the Greek heritage is fundamentally no different from Europe’s title to Christianity. In these later phases of world history Europe has been the most effective bearer of both the Christian message and the Greek heritage. But just as it would be a mistake to let Europe nationalize Christianity, it would be a mistake to let her confiscate the hellenic inheritance. The Greeks must at last be allowed to emerge as what they really are—the fathers not of a European civilization but of a universal modernity.” A. A. Mazrui, Political Values and the Educated Class in Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 97; quoted in Ngu ˜ gı˜ wa Thiong’o, Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams: Towards a Critical Theory of the Arts and the State in Africa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 5. 26. I quote in English from Sophocles, Antigone, in The Three Theban Plays: Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, trans. Robert Fagles (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), ll. 500, 501 (hereafter cited as Theban Plays in the text), and in Greek from Antigone, The Women of Trachis, Philoctetes, Oedipus at Colonus, with trans.

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by Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), ll. 450, 452 (hereafter cited as Antigone, the Women in the text). 27. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 267 (hereafter cited as Phenomenology in the text); Phänomenologie des Geistes (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 329 (hereafter cited as Phänomenologie in the text). When Eteocles, Polynices’s brother, is buried, it is according to nómos; there is no conflict to force a disjuncture between custom and law (Theban Plays, ll. 29–30/Antigone, the Women, ll. 24). 28. In the Philosophy of Right, laws are no more than customs written down; G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 241. 29. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), 91. 30. See Harriet Ngubane, Mind and Body in Zulu Medicine: An Ethnography of Health and Disease in Nyuswa-Zulu Thought and Practice (London: Academic Press, 1977), 77–99. 31. In an analysis that draws on Mary Douglas, Ngubane argues that the Zulu women about whom she is writing occupy a position of “marginality,” between “this world” and “the other world,” between the living and the dead. Drawing an analogy among mother, mourner, and diviner, she observes: “The argument . . . about the mother and chief mourner being channels through whose bodies spiritual beings cross from the other world and from this world to the other world, applies also to the diviner, who is a point of contact with the spirits who return to this world. Through a woman the transition of spiritual beings is made. This point is crucial in that it explains why diviners are women and why men must become transvestites to be diviners.” Ngubane, Mind and Body, 86, 88. 32. Of course, as Diana Taylor notes, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo mobilized around the demand for the reappearance, alive, of the disappeared: Aparición con vida; Taylor, Disappearing Acts, 183. 33. Ignatieff, “Digging up the Dead”; Meer, Trial of Andrew Zondo, 170. 34. The discourse of the National Party and its ideologues in the years leading up to 1948 register a phobia of “blood-mixing” (bloedvermenging), taken up from the Afrikaans academics who drafted the landmark 1932 Carnegie Report on White Poverty. Carnegie Commission of Investigation on the Poor White Question in South Africa, The Poor White Problem in South Africa: Report of the Carnegie Commission, 5 vols. (Stellenbosch: Pro-Ecclesia, 1932); Geoffrey Cronjé, ’n Tuiste vir die nageslag: Die blywende oplossing van Suid-Afrika se rassevraagstukke ( Johannesburg: Publicité, 1945); Geoffrey Cronjé, W. Nicol, and E. P. Groenewald, Regverdige rasse-apartheid (Stellenbosch: CSV Boekhandel, 1947); see also J. M. Coetzee, “The Mind of Apartheid: Geoffrey Cronjé (1907–),” Social Dynamics 17, no. 1 (1991): 1–35; Saul Dubow, Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 35. Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 16–23. 36. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 269. 37. This is also why it is important to note the limitations of Hegelian theories

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of psychic or cultural colonization, which depend on access, actual or promised, of the colonized to the civic life of the colonizer—an access available, if at all, to a small native elite. We would, in this light, have to reread the writings of, among others, Frantz Fanon (Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann [New York: Grove Press, 1967]); and Albert Memmi (The Colonizer and the Colonized, trans. Howard Greenfeld, expanded ed. [Boston: Beacon Press, 1991]). 38. Mamdani, Citizen and Subject, 18. 39. See also Mamdani, Citizen and Subject, 15. 40. Mamdani, Citizen and Subject, 109. 41. See Terence Ranger, “The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawn and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 211–62; Terence Ranger, “Missionaries, Migrants, and the Manyika: The Invention of Ethnicity in Zimbabwe,” in The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa, ed. Leroy Vail (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 118–50; Martin Chanock, Law, Custom, and Social Order: The Colonial Experience in Malawi and Zambia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Shula Marks, “Patriotism, Patriarchy and Purity: Natal and the Politics of Zulu Ethnic Consciousness,” in The Creation of Tribalism, ed. Vail, 215–40; anonymous, “Ethnicity and Pseudo-Ethnicity in the Ciskei,” in The Creation of Tribalism, ed. Vail, 395–413. 42. H. J. Simons, African Women: Their Legal Status in South Africa (London: C. Hurst, 1968), 26, 53. 43. Simons, African Women, 26. 44. T. W. Bennett, Human Rights and African Customary Law under the South African Constitution (Cape Town: Juta, 1995), 86–93. 45. Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, Act No. 108 of 1996 (South Africa), subsection 9 (3). 46. Since this essay was written there have been new developments. The Recognition of Customary Marriages Act, 1998, brings customary marriage in line with the Constitution: “A wife in a customary marriage has, on the basis of equality with her husband and subject to the matrimonial property system governing the marriage, full status and capacity, including the capacity to acquire assets and to dispose of them, to enter into contracts and to litigate, in addition to any rights and powers that she might have at customary law” (section 6). The full text of the act is available online: http://www.polity.org.za/govdocs/legislation/1998/act120.pdf (November 26, 2001). 47. Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, subsection 211 (1). 48. Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, subsection 211 (2). 49. Mary Maboreke, “Women and Law in Post-independence Zimbabwe: Experiences and Lessons,” in Putting Women on the Agenda, ed. Susan Bazilli ( Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1991), 219; Iain Currie, “The Future of Customary Law: Lessons from the Lobolo Debate,” in Gender and the New South African Legal Order, ed. Christina Murray (Cape Town: Juta, 1994), 149. 50. Catherine Albertyn, “Women and the Transition to Democracy in South Africa,” in Gender and the New South African Legal Order, ed. Murray, 57. 51. Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, section 30. 52. Albertyn, “Women and the Transition,” 59.

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53. Lalu and Harris, “Journeys from the Horizons of History,” 35–36. 54. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 89–90. 55. Writing at a time when the Bantustans were being established, Simons insists on the political necessity, when whites authorize themselves to speak for blacks, of a distinction between “‘own’ customs” and “traditional law”: “Today many Whites— politicians, officials, anthropologists, even missionaries—would say that Africans wish to observe their ‘own’ customs. The answer begs the question, however. The customs of today are often not the same as those that are embodied in the traditional law.” Simons, African Women, 51–52. 56. “The report was published in a book which was sent with a personal letter from the president to every affected family. The letter was another important gesture in that it was addressed to the individuals and pointed out where in the book the details of their loved ones could be found.” Jose Zalaquett, “Chile,” in Dealing with the Past: Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa, ed. Alex Boraine, Janet Levy, and Ronel Scheffer (Cape Town: IDASA, 1994), 52. 57. Claude Lefort, “Politics and Human Rights,” in The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986), 258. 58. Concerning Maurice Blanchot’s The Madness of the Day, Derrida writes: “This text also speaks the law, its own and that of the other as reader.” Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” trans. Avital Ronell, in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), 242. 59. Emmanuel Lévinas, “La trace de l’autre,” in En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (Paris: Vrin, 1967), 187–202. 60. See Mark Sanders, “Responding to the ‘Situation’ of Modisane’s Blame Me on History: Towards an Ethics of Reading in South Africa,” Research in African Literatures 25, no. 4 (1994): 51–67. Also see the numerous references to ancestors in Rigoberta Menchú, I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, ed. Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, trans. Ann Wright (London: Verso, 1983). Paul de Man’s “Autobiography as De-facement” (Modern Language Notes 94 [1979]: 919–30) is the key text for thinking autobiography as address to, and by, the dead one. 61. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 76–77. 62. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 430.

Marc Nichanian

Catastrophic Mourning

THE INTERDICTION OF MOURNING

In 1895 a long series of pogroms was unleashed from one end of the Armenian high plateau to the other. Of course it was a question of local pogroms, but their geographical and chronological succession strongly suggests that the authorization and the incitement to massacre came from the very center of Ottoman power, from the palace of the sultan. Many American observers (missionaries, doctors, travelers, Catholic nuns) became the chroniclers of these atrocious events, which were only the prelude to the extermination of the Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire. Among the Armenians, this series of pogroms did not provoke a large-scale literary reaction. In Eastern Armenian, Aharonian described the misery of the Armenians in his short stories, a serialization of affliction and distress.1 In Western Armenian, Souren Bartevian, an often underestimated writer, attempted to describe the hideous features of collective death, wanting at the same time to move and to shock his readers.2 A poet, Siamanto, made the infinite lament of the victims reverberate.3 As a whole, it is a tragic literature, but not first-rate. Between 1896 and 1908, men of letters writing in Western Armenian lived for the most part in exile; they subsisted in conditions of unseemly poverty, and were divided by fierce political animosities. In the face of murder, “literature” was powerless. We have testimonies, articles, we can read the long litany of those for whom justice was not done and who demand revenge, nothing more. The time of mourning had not yet come. In any case, the murder had only just begun. And yet, one thing was already clear: there is no art without mourning. The terrible series of pogroms of 1895 had not touched the Armenians Translated from the French by Jeff Fort.

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of central and western Anatolia. It had completely forgotten the Armenians of Cilicia. These latter were obviously spared nothing for having waited. Fourteen years later, in April 1909, barely a year after the Young Turk revolution, during a moment of instability marked by an abortive attempt by the sultan Abdul-Hamid to regain power, a new series of pogroms was unleashed, this time in Cilicia, in Adana, and in all the villages populated in whole or in part by Armenians. That happened ninety years ago. Since then, the common assessment has remained constant on the number of victims: thirty thousand dead. The foreign observers of these pogroms in Cilicia were less numerous than for those of 1895 on the high plateau, but there were quite a few. This time, the literary reaction of the Armenians was more immediate. A number of books were written. One was by Souren Bartevian, whom I already mentioned.4 None of them, however, succeeds in describing the horror of death and survival. These books are filled with the odor of blood but also with powerless calls for human justice. They are not works of literature, of course. Nor are they really testimonies. For those who wrote them, the representatives of human justice were beyond the borders of the Ottoman Empire; they spoke languages that the Armenians did not know. One might indeed reach them by means of campaigns for political recognition; one could try to move their consciences. The Armenians did not fail to do so. However, these calls for justice could not be of any use in the end, since they were also appeals to fine feelings. They had but one effect: to delay mourning again and always to put it off, indefinitely, until later. Today, we can formulate in one sentence the deferred action of these two events, the pogroms of 1895 and those of 1909: the Armenians were barred from mourning.5 Collective murder did more than kill. Already, very clearly, well before the genocidal violence swept over the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire during World War I, collective murder imposed on the collective psyche of the victims a generalized interdiction of mourning. Only this old interdiction explains the modalities and the illusions of the political action of Armenians and, in particular, the development of a movement of “national liberation,” which has been only a long movement of national suicide. I won’t push this point; these matters are too painful. In July 1909, three months after the pogroms, a woman, Zabel Essayan, took part in a delegation sent to Adana by the Armenian patriarchate of Constantinople to aid the stricken and especially to organize the search for orphans. Zabel Essayan stayed in Cilicia during the months of July, August, and part of September. We are familiar with the details from her partly published correspondence.6 She returned to Constantinople the third week of September 1909, although her mission was far from being accomplished. Something in her had broken down. Her correspondence suggests

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that her departure strongly resembled a flight, as though she could no longer hold up against the horror displayed by the survivors, on pain of renouncing her own self, her person, her psychical integrity. She returns, then, and she begins to write—first some short testimonials on what she saw there, practically unnameable. She does not manage at first to delimit the unnameable. And yet, already, she calls it “the catastrophe,” without a capital letter, in Armenian: aghed. In her articles, there is no complaint, no call for human justice, which she had in fact seen at work turning its pomp and its gallows against the victims themselves. She struggles with language, her own. She bears witness, but she does not bear witness only to what she has seen. She bears witness to an experience, that of the Catastrophe. No one before her had tried to do this. She insists on doing it, not for moral or political reasons, but because she knows she is threatened. If she does not bear witness to her experience of the unnameable, she too will be carried away by delirium and irrationality. In a word, it is quite clear: by madness. A modern Antigone, she confronts, then, the interdiction of mourning. Antigone had the chance to rise up against an explicit interdiction. However, this time she must struggle against an interdiction that is completely implicit but no less absolute. She writes for a year and a half. In February 1911, she finishes her book, to which she gives the title Aweraknerun me¯
, which translates as Among the Ruins.7 It is one of the greatest works of Western Armenian literature. Zabel Essayan does not recount the facts of the month of April 1909. She was not there. She does not even attempt to reconstitute the facts. She says only what she has seen and heard, in Mersine, in Adana, then in each of the villages she passes through on a reconnaissance voyage (her mission was limited to the orphans in Adana). But at the same time, she recounts how at each moment she is submerged, engulfed by the horrifying misery of the stricken (this is what she calls the survivors, themselves invaded by horror, incapable of detaching themselves from it). This book was written in order to bear witness, of course, but above all—and in a very personal manner—in order for the author to liberate herself from the terror, from the submersion, from the too great identification with the stricken. It is first of all a book written in order to survive this mortal identification. That is what makes its greatness. Is it still literature? The question is futile. Like all great books, it puts broadly into question what we thought we knew about writing, the function of writing, and therefore literature in general. Written in closest proximity to the Catastrophe, testifying to a mad experience, at bottom already to an experience of madness that is the experience of the Catastrophe, it is a book of mourning, written against the interdiction of mourning. And if it is art, then—and in the West this has not been acknowledged since Hölderlin—art is mourning.

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Before discussing this book, commenting on a few pages (I will be unable to do more in the present context), I think it is necessary to say a few words about who this woman, Zabel Essayan, was before that time. I will do this in reference to a few quotations from the man who no doubt knew her best and who has said the most intelligent things about her, Hagop Oshagan. These quotations will be taken from the monograph that he devoted to her in his ten-volume Hamapatker Arewmtahay Grakanut ean (Panorama of Western Armenian Literature).8 This “patchwork” will serve as a brief introduction. Born in 1878 in Sgudar, on the eastern bank of the Bosphorus, Zabel Essayan spent a happy childhood under the protection of a father who all her life remained her great love. She studied in Paris, where she wrote some articles and poetry in French and married a young Armenian painter who, for his part, never succeeded in recovering from this marriage and from the turbulent life his wife never ceased to lead. Zabel Essayan returned to Constantinople in 1902, began to write articles, often with a feminist slant, for the Armenian journals of the city, as well as books of autobiography and satire. She was the most loved and no doubt the freest woman of Armenian Constantinople, unaffected, direct, free of ostentatious gestures, peaceful in her relations with the Turks as well as the Armenians, always driven by passion. Later, after several moves between Paris and the Ottoman capital, it was only by a miracle that she managed to leave Turkey in 1915 and find refuge first in Bulgaria, then in the Caucasus. Hagop Oshagan speaks of the limitless admiration he has for her in some pages written in 1942. First he praises her talent as a novelist: In West-Armenian literature, the name Zabel Essayan is distinguished, among the relatively abundant group of women writers, for being an exceptionally valuable testimony to the powers of our literature as well as to her own. At the same time, this name is attached to a rare success in the domain of the novel, true and absolute. No one among us deserves more than she the title that is used to characterize her talent, namely the psychological novelist. . . . She is the greatest and only artisan of the novel, the psychological novel, among us.9

Oshagan then characterizes her great work, Among the Ruins, by placing it in a very particular category, the chronicle, which the Armenians had indeed always practiced throughout the past. In addition, he presents the work as a “testimony.” These two characterizations express the hesitation of the writer-historian before he can qualify her work as “literature,” and then only with difficulty. He suggests that new categories must be invented when the writing enters into the poorly explored regions of the interdiction of mourning and the Catastrophe.

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Outside the novel, she will put her talent to the test, to achieve the glory of a great masterpiece, in another literary genre which, although minor, is justified by the conditions of our literature. I am referring to the chronicle, to which most of our writers, men and women, have made their personal offering. This book, Among the Ruins, is a stream of tragic impressions which she wrote—if I may be permitted the expression—with her body. As in the novel, her name stands alone also in this literature of impressions. This testimony drawn from the disaster of Cilicia is unique in the literary chronicles of the past and of the present.10 . . . Zabel Essayan was involved extensively in the currents of thought occurring in 1910. It was thus that she carried out that terrible act of devotion towards the region of the disaster, Cilicia, where as a delegate of the Patriarchate she no doubt lived the most unbearable tragedy of her existence. Of this massacred country she would leave to us what she has seen and heard, in the form of an immortal testimony on the values and the afflictions of her people and those close to her.11 . . . Among the Ruins is a sort of Inferno in her work, bearing in it a truth which leaves even Dante in the shadows. Before the burned countryside of Cilicia, she passed beyond the measure that is customary to the writer, she grasped the fatherland in its totality, in its soul and its history. Our literature has no work that is as close to the entrails of our race.12

Oshagan also gives, as he often does in his monographs on writers, his personal testimony on her, in the form of a biographical detail, a moment in her existence: The war had begun. She was wanted by the authorities. I saw her at a friend’s house. She was in a sad and desperate state. The writer in her had gone silent during this period. The deportations in the provinces, the terrifying details were multiplying, the martyrdom of her spiritual and literary brothers imprinted on her face this unspeakable experience that we lived in 1915. Her flight from Constantinople, a veritable miracle, could have provided the material for a novel. She did not write this novel, which would have contained twists of fate beyond all imagination, just as I did not write mine.13 I remember my last visit to her in the summer of 1915. Her deported comrades had stopped sending her news. The carnage continued in the provinces, without making any noise. I spoke of the massacres of Cilicia, her book on it had just come out. The author of the book was wanted by the authorities. She had made plans to flee to Bulgaria and she harbored no doubts as to what would happen to her if she were caught. At that time, it was very clear what she thought of the Turks.14

Finally, he tries to speak in his turn of the Inferno of Cilicia in April 1909 and what the event represented for the intellectuals of his generation: Among the Ruins is equally a reportage. I will not concern myself here with the political situation connected with that infinite disaster. The Turks, like all

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those who have a forceful hold on power, would accord us ample rights to be concerned with such futilities. The naked, terrible and cold reality is that one spring morning one of the two peoples who had lived side by side for centuries took up arms against the other, and skewered with a sword everything they could get their hands on, woman, man, son and daughter. When the knife does not suffice, fire takes over. When the evening falls, there is nothing left but smoke, and bones to cover over. I repeat: the tragedy is not in the Why! It’s the How that revolted our conscience and our intellect. How the hearts of men could be transformed into stone from one instant to the next, in order to tolerate all the things that transform each page of this book into a miniature Passion, much more terrifying than anything similar one might read in Dante and the others?15

SACRIFICE OF AN ETHNICITY FOR THE END OF ETHNICITIES

What then is this book of 1911, Among the Ruins? Is it a testimony? A reportage? A chronicle? We must follow Zabel Essayan, step by step, in order perhaps to understand how she takes on, bodily (if I may put it this way, following Hagop Oshagan), the question of mourning. The year, then, is 1911. She writes the preface to her book: My project was therefore to communicate to those who belong to our people, but also to our [Turkish] compatriots, who have remained strangers to our reactions and our sufferings, the infinite misery I contemplated in deepest darkness for a period of three months. If I have been able to depict what has become of a people driven mad by the terrors of blood and fire, a people who, given over to senseless decisions, flees the ancestral land, if I have been able to express these nightmares that darken and make dismal even the sky of the fatherland to eyes blinded by tears, that render the climate inhospitable, and the earth dry and sterile as the breast of a mother deprived of milk for these emaciated and defenseless bodies . . . if I have been able equally to say with sincerity that these backs hunched over from the whip of persecution still have within them the force to will and to feel, that these souls are full of a sacred flame, I believe I will have rendered my service to the fatherland. Indeed, no one will ever again dare to approach with contempt and hatred these humble people who, armed with an unshakable faith, despite the intolerable injustices, despite the gallows raised on still-smoking ruins, will offer blindly, instinctively, their blood-stained and crumbling existences to all the currents of progress, in order to rise against the greatest danger threatening the fatherland, against the return of dictatorship, in whatever form and behind whatever mask it manifests itself in the future.16

The “fatherland” she speaks of here is, of course, the Ottoman fatherland. It is impossible to know to what degree Zabel Essayan is sincere in this preface, written after the fact.17 She wants to give a sense to what she has

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just written. For her this means attempting to give a sense to what happened. For, in the end, the senseless threatens. What then is the sense she gives to the events, to the spilled blood, the nightmares, the terror, and even the abominable injustice? Very clearly the sense of a sacrifice. This theme will return several times in the body of the text, and it must be taken seriously from the beginning. Let us assume that the only human response to death is mourning. But is mourning a response to senseless death? This is the first paradox we observe when faced with the fact of the Catastrophe: everywhere, it seems, mourning is sufficient to make sense; faced with the Catastrophe, on the contrary, a sense is necessary so that mourning can occur. Therefore, an idea is necessary. This is the modern form of sacrifice. These bloodied existences were sacrificed to “the fatherland,” she says, which here means precisely to an Ottoman “fatherland” in which the status of “minorities” would have changed radically. She says very explicitly: “We clung to this idea: ‘We too had had our victims; this time our blood flowed for our Turkish compatriots. This will be the last time.’ ”18 She still believes, perhaps pretends to believe, that coexistence remains possible. She even says that coexistence becomes possible for the first time, exempt from the relations of domination and subjection, which, however, were necessarily at the core of the Ottoman Empire.19 She also attempts the impossible. She wants to appear in these pages as an observer, animated by sentiments that are simply human. “So that the reader will also not be subject to prejudices or biases, I will go so far as to wish that the nationality of the writer be forgotten, and that one remember only that the pain, indignation, rage and despair expressed in these pages are purely human feelings.”20 She returns to this theme at the end of her preface: “What I have seen, what I have heard, was capable of shaking an entire State in its foundations. . . . This is the main feeling which drove me to write without reserves of any kind, as a free citizen, as an authentic daughter of my country, with the same rights and duties that everyone has. These pages should be read not as the fruit of an Armenian woman’s hypersensitivity, but as the spontaneous and sincere impressions of a human being on the same level as everyone else.”21 Zabel Essayan therefore does all she possibly can to explain that she is not writing in order to speak of affliction and vengeance or from a sense of belonging to a people, to a faction in a multiethnic state. She proceeds as if ethnicity were henceforth a private affair, somewhat like religion in the modern state. The fact of being Christian or Jewish in France in 1911 did not harm in any way the status of citizenship, interfered in no way with the rights and duties of the citizen, with the existence of the state. Zabel Essayan imagines for a moment finding herself in this type of situation. The multiethnic state would have represented, if it were real or even possible,

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another dimension, acquired at great cost, another plane involving no interference at all with the ethnic identifications of its citizens and therefore with its ethnic makeup. Was this a pious wish? Was it for her, Zabel Essayan, a necessity to believe that it really was so? There are strong reasons for doubting this if we consider that the constitutional Ottoman world, already in the period around 1910, was in a moment of crisis. Everyone was officially a citizen, represented for himself or herself, and as a citizen, before the state. But the old structure of domination remained as it had been, unchanged despite everything. Not a jot had been modified, Hagop Oshagan would have said. In addition, the Young Turks had already begun to use the term Ottomanization in the sense of “Turkification.”22 The dream of the Armenians in 1910 was that citizenship in the modern sense be superimposed on ethnicity. Belonging to an ethnic group would no longer have any place in the apparatus of the state, just as it had no place in its essence. They did not know that this was indeed what was going to happen, but at the price of their very existence. The “liberal” revolution of the Young Turks in 1908, the reactionary backlash of 1909, the victory against the reaction in the days that followed, in April 1909, had fostered the illusion of a democratic and liberal state within the borders of the empire. Zabel Essayan, therefore, gives from the beginning an interpretation of the Cilician catastrophe. We should not, she says, give “reciprocal mistrust” (between Armenians and Turks) a chance to express itself. I have not, she says, been driven by “conventional formulas” of revenge and nationalism; much to the contrary, since the catastrophic event was nothing other than an expression of ethnic hatred and a will to maintain the empire in a nondemocratic and nonliberal situation, in which there are no citizens, no subjects, in which there is only belonging to a group. The generalized pogroms of Cilicia were, therefore, in the eyes of Zabel Essayan, only the last convulsion of the ancien régime, in which citizenship, and equality among citizens, did not exist. Today, Zabel Essayan writes in the name of democratic citizenship, in order to point out to all her “compatriots” (Turks as well as Armenians) the dangers of dictatorship, past or future. It is in fact the victims of yesterday who will offer their bloody existences to the currents of progress, for the defense of the citizen as such, the idea of the citizen. Zabel Essayan adds: this was in any case “the greatest crime that was imputed to us.” We have been massacred, we have suffered, we were doomed to martyrdom on the altar of democratic freedom, not of the freedom of a particular people who wanted to throw off the yoke of another people (that is, at bottom, what we would call today a nationalist attitude), but in the name of the democracy of the free state (a state free of ethnicities). Ethnicity was sacrificed in the name of the end of ethnicities. An extraordinary argument. A strange faith also, which remains blind to the events, to the real situation in the country, to the even more terrible

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nightmares taking shape on the horizon. Will Zabel Essayan be able to uphold such arguments after 1915–16? Obviously not. That is the very drama of this entire generation of writers. Already in 1909 and 1910 the crime was so terrible, so immeasurable, that one had at all costs to give it a rectifying explanation, making it possible to mourn, at one stroke, so many lives and making it possible to understand in particular the intolerable and incomprehensible suffering of the children, which takes center stage in the first chapters of the book on Cilicia. These same writers, for whom Zabel Essayan led the way, observed a total and obstinate silence after 1919, this time offering no interpretation at all, no longer proposing arguments of any kind. No political interpretation, of course, could be sustained before the will to extermination without remainder. Let us, for a moment more, give in to the charms of biography. After 1922, Zabel Essayan became the propagandist for the Soviet state, because she wanted to be on the side of reality, victory, and survival. No doubt she could no longer bear being on the side of complete destruction, of victimization. Her attitude placed her straightaway, then, in a state of rupture in relation to her earlier political action, which she considered at least implicitly as having been responsible for the catastrophe of her people.23 She was unable to justify the Catastrophe in the name of citizenship in a supraethnic state. She no longer had any way to explain the will to remainderless extermination. And yet she participated in humanitarian actions, devoting all her time and energy to them. She wrote subtle psychological stories (her two finest stories in this vein were written in the terrible year of 1916). She wrote novels (e.g., Nahan
ol uzˇer [Retreating forces]) in order to describe or to confirm her own political transformation. Why did she not write a new Among the Ruins? She worked with escapees, with the stricken, with survivors and orphans after 1918, as much as or even more than in 1909. But now she no longer had any (theoretical) grasp of the immeasurable event. In everything I have said there is, however, a considerable reserve. One can indeed doubt whether the interpretation proposed here is really Zabel Essayan’s. I did slightly force this interpretation by formulating it thus: an ethnicity was partly sacrificed, its blood was spilled, so that ethnicity would disappear as a principle in the concept and in the action of the state, what one calls the struggle for freedom, which is then no longer a particular freedom, but indeed a universal freedom, that of the citizen, a freedom in relation to and in opposition with ethnic belonging. If one does not force it as I have done, if one leaves it at its explicit and naïve level, it comes down to saying, the Armenians of Cilicia were victims of the ancien régime. But beginning with her preface, Zabel Essayan expresses in muffled tones her astonishment, her scandal, her revolt, at seeing that even after being taken in hand by the new regime, the Armenians are imprisoned, perse-

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cuted, judged, condemned, and hanged. At the same time, in her letters, Zabel Essayan constantly expresses her very great mistrust of the Young Turks. Finally, in Among the Ruins, the chapter on the prisons begins thus: With everyone there is discouragement, an extreme despair, they respond with bitter irony to our words of encouragement. “We were the victims of the reactionary movement. They were accustomed to hitting us on the head, which means that we were the ones they hit the hardest. . . . Not only us, but also all the liberal elements of the country were in danger. We shared the crisis of the country. There you have it . . . let us explain thus the catastrophe of Adana.” We were gathered together in the hall of the bishopric, where dignitaries of different Christian communities and personalities of Adana had come to greet the second delegation of the Patriarchate. While a newcomer from Constantinople was trying to console and encourage the locals in this way, a voice spoke into the hollow of my ear: “All those who did not want to die, all those who wanted to defend their wives and children are either in prison, or on the run, or else hiding away somewhere.”24

These lines make up the introduction to the chapter on the prisons and in fact to the whole section that includes the two chapters, prisons and gallows, at the precise center of the book. What drives the people mad is not having undergone the massacres but the gallows that come afterward. For the gallows testify to a will to annihilate all resistance, a will to grind everything into dust. It shows the presence of a collective machine on the march, against which nothing can be done. But above all, in the introduction to the chapter on prisons, it seems that Zabel Essayan expresses her fundamental mistrust, which is for her also the most profound terror. Before the will to extermination, no reflection, no human argument, can put up any resistance. “Until the day came when the news arrived from Istanbul that the death sentences had been suspended, until then people had lived in the painful memory of the first gallows. Anxious and driven mad, they were unwilling to hear any word of consolation. Each person forgot his or her own pain and grief, it was an invincible and collective crowd whose emotions turned at times even against us.”25 It is this introduction to the chapters on the prisons and the gallows that allows one retrospectively to express very serious doubts concerning the significance and even the sincerity of the preface, which interpreted the bloodshed through the idea of a resistance against the old regime and against dictatorship, the idea of a supraethnic state in whose name ethnicity would have been sacrificed. And yet this is how Zabel Essayan herself would like to understand the events, through the idea of sacrifice. In fact, this is the only way to understand and accept what happened and to initiate mourning. Otherwise, it would mean that the interdiction of mourning is definitive, invincible (which it evidently was), that the remainderless extermination is underway, which concerns

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everyone, even the one who writes. To the exterior and in some sense “political” response to the interdiction of mourning, Zabel Essayan will now juxtapose her book itself, the monument of mourning, which is in no way a political response to the interdiction. Unless we believe that when Antigone buries Polynices, she is already, or once again, carrying out a political duty.

IMAGINING, REPRESENTING

It is necessary now to review the themes developed in chapter 2 of Among the Ruins, which is itself a summary of the work. At the beginning of this very short chapter, after giving a description of the stricken city, Essayan presents her observations: The destroyed city stretches out under the generous and dazzling sun like an endless cemetery. Nothing but ruins on every side. . . . Nothing has been spared. All the churches, all the schools and all the dwellings have been transformed into heaps of charred and deformed stones, among which rises here and there the carcass of an apartment building. From the west to the east, from the north to the south, all the way to the distant Turkish quarters, cruel and implacable hatred has burnt everything, devastated everything. From this funereal desolation, from out of these endless piles of ashes one can see two minarets rising proudly, still intact. A dense crowd comes to us, made up of widows, orphans, old men covered with bloody rags and soaked in tears. This is all that remains of the population of Adana. They are pervaded by the disquieting calm of a sea come to rest after a great storm. They hide within them an inconsolable pain and grief, which comes to the surface from time to time. The hope of living and of being reborn has been killed in them. If Hunger and Thirst did not awaken them from this torpor, life would be extinguished once and for all. They remain silent for long periods, as if they were following the thread of their memories. They have undergone horrifying things and they let out poignant sighs that seem to tear them apart—“Oh my. . . .” At times they burst into tears, their faces drowned in an instant by such an abundance of tears that their cries and lamentations are stifled by them; their faces, tanned and dried by the sun, are furrowed with horrid wrinkles and terrible grimaces, and the entire crowd, struck by an access of grief that knows no rest, twists and turns in despair. It is impossible to imagine the sum of sorrows represented by each one of the people who make up this crowd.26

Zabel Essayan thus announces without delay the formula that will organize in advance her observations: the pain of the stricken is inconsolable. All hope of life and rebirth has been assassinated in them. They live and yet the life in them has been extinguished. We see in the words chosen that the observer overidentifies with the afflicted. What she says about the scene

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seems, at first sight in any case, an objective commentary about sufferings so immense that they submerge the observer: “It is impossible to imagine the sum of sorrows represented by each one of the people who make up this crowd.” I hesitate in translating this sentence. The Armenian verb erewakayel indeed translates as “imagine.” It is impossible to represent to oneself in imagination the sum of sorrows, she says. In order to understand what such a sentence is saying, we must shift the focus. It is not so much the (undeniable) immensity of suffering or the immediate (and thus limited) capacity of any given witness to grasp the suffering that is at issue here. For in the end “It is impossible to imagine” signifies, first and foremost, that Zabel Essayan is trying to imagine. To imagine is, of course, to identify with. It is a question, then, of a statement that focuses on the imagination itself as much as or even more than on the sufferings endured or the capacity of the witnesses to bear them. This infinitesimal modification of focus is indispensable. When faced with a catastrophic event, something evidently happens to the human power, so naturally human, of identification, in the sense of “to identify with” and therefore, by a familiar dialectic, in the sense of “to identify oneself,” to acquire an identity, whether renewed or lost forever. From the beginning, then, Zabel Essayan says the Catastrophe is unrepresentable; but from the beginning, she also gives a precise meaning to this word: it is beyond all representation for an identification. In sum, the scene of the Catastrophe is not that of the tragic theater. Hence a question that is insistent from the beginning: In what scene, then, is the modern Catastrophe representable? What can a modern Antigone do? How does she confront the interdiction and raise a monument to mourning? But we have already moved too quickly toward representation. In this sentence from chapter 2 on the limits of the imagination, we must indeed note that it is not only a question of imagining the suffering of each survivor. Zabel Essayan says clearly that what must be imagined and what is, however, beyond all imagination is the “sum” of the sufferings. This necessity to say the “sum” or the “totality,” when faced with the catastrophic event, will return repeatedly, like a leitmotif. This is the first time we encounter it. The following is another example, taken from chapter 4 (on the orphans gathered in Mersine): When I saw for the first time these pale orphans with their haggard appearances, gathered together by the hundreds, I was unable—despite superhuman efforts—to grasp the totality of their misfortune, and still today I cannot. Particular details and images (patkerner) come to mind, certainly, but never have I been able to take account of the infinite (ansahmaneli), bloody history that each of these children represents. For a long time I was incapable of attending to any one of them in particular. I heard a confused, uncertain, indefinite (ansahmaneli) tragic ululation, expressed by the totality of these still childish, still distracted gazes that had not yet understood what had hap-

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pened. This bloodbath, this stream of spilled blood, this despair of a humanity driven mad, caught between fire and blade, all this remained beyond my imagination, and I believe this was the case for everyone involved.27

In the beyond of catastrophic murder the issue that needs to be considered is, indeed, the sum of the sufferings. The sum of sufferings is unimaginable precisely as a totality. There are perhaps “images” of this or that suffering, of murder and of pain. The Catastrophe, however, obliges us to imagine more than murder, pain, and death. It calls for, it demands, an image of the totality, the sum. This call and this demand are difficult to grasp. Perhaps one must be content at first to record them. They are a constitutive part of the catastrophic experience. Only after the call and the demand for an image of the totality of sufferings are recorded as particular to catastrophic death, and also after the limit of the imagination has been recorded, can one ask: How do we say the unimaginable, the “un-image-able”? What is the force of writing when faced with the Catastrophe? If the imagination has a limit, does what is written have a limit as well? Is it the same limit? Do we have something other than images for saying the unimaginable? Here we find the whole literary problem that must be confronted by anyone attempting to respond to the injunction of the Catastrophe and to oppose the interdiction of mourning. At the same time, we see that the limit of the imagination is also the limit of mourning. The interdiction plays itself out in both scenes. Zabel Essayan would never have been able to approach the Catastrophe and take on her role as a modern Antigone if she had contented herself with making “literature.” Literature, in the sense in which it is usually defined, avoids the interdiction of mourning. Consequently, it necessarily avoids those hazardous regions where representation encounters its limit in human language. After 1915, it was necessary to wait fifty years for the great Armenian writers of the twentieth century (Zareh Vorpouni in France, Gurgen Mahari in Armenia)28 to raise their literary monuments as monuments of mourning. In 1911, Zabel Essayan could confront the interdiction of mourning only in the form of a direct testimony and a challenge of witnessing. Nevertheless, Zabel Essayan also plays on “images.” The first great image used in the whole first part of the book is, as we saw in the beginning, that of the crowd. The empirical reason for this is obvious: it is as a crowd that she encounters the stricken, in moments when distributing relief supplies or when taking in refugees. But, no doubt, empirical reasons are not decisive for someone who must confront the interdiction of mourning. The impossibility of imagining returns several times in the first chapters. Immediately after the passage just considered, we read: “Indeed, it is not possible to grasp or to perceive straightaway the terrible reality. This latter

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is beyond the limits of human imagination.”29 The terrible reality in question is that which the survivors and the stricken have lived through, that which they survived: nameless terror, horror. As before, it is first of all a question of individual and psychological reality. And yet, in the next sentence, it is clear that something else is involved, the event itself, the nature of the event. “Those who lived through it are also incapable of recounting it as a whole. Everyone stammers, sighs, weeps, and can bring out only bits of pieces of the events.”30 They cannot recount it, they stutter, certainly. But what they are unable to recount is, once again, what she calls the “whole.” They can tell it only in bits and pieces. The event has annulled in them the possibility of recounting the totality. In essence, the event is such that beyond it there remains only a speech in pieces, splinters and fragments of speech. In this way one might better understand the insistence on the “sum,” the “totality,” here the “whole.” The event is such that it must be pronounced as a whole. If wholeness is lacking, the result is disintegration. The event is one of those that shatter speech. Zabel Essayan says it very clearly, and she is very probably the first to understand this immeasurable fact. It is because their speech, inhabited by the totality of the event, is shattered, reduced to pieces, reduced to a fragmentary state, that the survivors are here “the stricken.” They are stricken in language. How, precisely, does this shattering of language take place? By the fact that the event never passed. It is still in the present. This presence in the present of a past event, which is also what is proper to trauma, is marked several times in the book by scenes of terror transported into the present of the narration. It is in order to exorcise this presence of the past event that Zabel Essayan carries out these changes of literary time. We find instances of this already in the present chapter. We find another, even more apparent, in the subsequent chapter, on the mass in the church in Adana, a crowd scene, once again, in which the assembled collectively relive the moment of the drama, like a psychodrama, which she relives with them. This she should be placed in quotation marks. For who is “she” at this moment? It is really a question, as we will see, of moments of collective possession, with fear, anguish, and terror, that are relived in the present, but this time directed by the context, the speech of the officiant, the coded and immutable tradition of the sacrifice in the church mass. Immediately after this movement through the relived terror of the present-past event, for the third or fourth time in the space of a page the theme of the unimaginable returns. The Catastrophe cannot be contained in stories, says Zabel Essayan, it cannot be contained in what I see of it or in its consequences. With regard to the Catastrophe, everything remains anecdotal: Despair and terror had been so great that the mothers no longer recognized their own children; old women, paralyzed and blind, lay forgotten in burned-

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down houses; people on the point of dying went mad hearing the diabolical laughter of a savage and bloodthirsty crowd; detached limbs and children’s bodies still trembling with pain and life were trampled underfoot. Caught between rifles on one side and flames on the other, children, women and the wounded who, panic-stricken, had taken refuge in schools and churches, were burning to death entwined with one another. And yet, neither these stories, nor these remains of Armenians twitching in the ashes, nor these orphans with pained and terrified eyes, who seemed still beside themselves with horror, nor the widows with bodies wrenched by inconsolable losses, nor the still bleeding and exposed wounds of the amputees, none of these allowed us to imagine in all its obscure fullness what had happened during these days of hell on earth.31

This something beyond the representable, beyond all possible narration (a narration supposes in any case an unshattered language, but inversely, if a narration were possible, it would not say or represent the Catastrophe), has no name. One cannot fix it, look at it directly, make of it an idea or a concept, nor can one make of it an object of science or knowledge. No discipline could account for it in its essence and wholeness. There are some, Essayan says, who have before their eyes, still and always, only one scene, one moment. It is still the past event that cannot become past, linked to the extreme experience of trauma. The Catastrophe is expressed fugitively, in all its obscure fullness, in people’s eyes and in the horror they reflect. The Catastrophe is the anaphoric object that passes across discourses, that never presents itself as such (as an object) for the gaze. This is the sense in which it is ungraspable. It is in the anxious and terror-stricken eyes that, at times, I seem to perceive it for a brief instant. Oh, these eyes! Some seem to have become blind, have renounced forever the joys of the sun, and appear to be as empty as bottomless pits. Others look at you without seeing you, for a single image remains carved into the span of their gaze. Some have kept within themselves the rhythm of the terrifying flames. Still others, with restless pupils, tortured by the repetition of the scenes of fire and blood, seem to strive for blindness and peace.32

This is the overriding theme of the chapter and of the entire book: how to fix the Catastrophe, how to say it, when one knows that it resides in the shattering of language and that no narration can take account of it. Should it be done through the repetition of stories despite all this? Or through the fugitive flash of the event’s horror, always present? In order to decide this, there follows a series of examples, each of which Essayan will take up later within the book: the mother obliged to kill her own child so as not to be discovered; the mother of Missak, the hanged man; those who have lost their reason and never cease reliving the horrifying scene; those who have lost their father, husband, brothers, one after the other, and who tell their

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stories in a state of apathy; the woman who says “everything’s gone to hell, to hell.” Just after these examples, we return to the irreparable and infinite character of the Catastrophe: incˇ  or ankangneli u andarmaneli k@ t’ui ays ansahmaneli ale¯tin me¯
. . .

I must translate first, before any explication. It says something like: “What appears irremediable and irreparable in this infinite catastrophe . . .”—in any case an extraordinary beginning of a sentence, not only because it says the irreparable but also because it plays on the Armenian word sahman (limit). It plays on the word without in any way playing, for the play imposes itself directly from her effort to arrive at an infinite “account.” Indeed, she has already said several times that the event, in its totality, was beyond the limits of the imagination—it shattered the speech that was supposed to account for it—but it was also beyond the limits of representation, that is, of the image. The Armenian word ansahmaneli brings together the two themes of chapter 4. We have already seen it at work in a passage from the chapter on the orphans: “. . . never have I been able to take account of the infinite (ansahmaneli) bloody history that each of these children represents. . . . I heard a confused, uncertain, indefinite (ansahmaneli) tragic ululation, expressed by the totality of these still childish, still distracted gazes that had not yet understood what had happened.” The event is infinite, it is outside every limit; it is also not definable. No law, no speech, no definition, no limit precisely, no finitude can contain it. So it is difficult to know whether to translate ansahmaneli as “this infinite catastrophe” or “this undefinable catastrophe” (which means also “for which there is no name, no sense”). The shattering of speech, of sense, and the shattering of the image come together here in a single word, in this word that qualifies the Catastrophe: ansahmaneli. The account of which it was just now a question is not only one of representation, of the imagination and its powerlessness; it is also one of mourning. The account supposes the existence of a measure and hence of a meaning. The violence that broke out here was a violence without any assignable measure. That is why it forbids mourning. The account is also the account of mourning. There is mourning only where there is a measure. But Zabel Essayan says something else, which again is not without relation to mourning: And what seems irreparable and irremediable in this undefinable catastrophe are not the houses reduced to ashes, the ravaged orchards, nor is it the immensity of the number of the dead. It is this discouraging feeling that hangs around everyone’s eyes, pitiably, desperately: the feeling of having been trampled collectively, of having been crushed by savage claws. These heads that had risen up humanly for an instant, in search of light and freedom, had been smashed with incomparable cruelty.33

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What appears irreparable and irremediable in this “infinite and undefinable” catastrophe? She goes so far as to say this, too: it is not the burned houses, it is not the lives that will not come back, it is not the number of dead, all the things one usually associates with the Catastrophe. It is a feeling, that of having been trampled: . . . the feeling of having been trampled collectively, of having been crushed by savage claws.

This is another important passage, for it is here that, despite everything, Zabel Essayan tries to name the unnameable. Houses have been burned elsewhere, large numbers of lives have been taken elsewhere, immeasurable losses have been suffered in other places. But here, why this sinister, infinite aspect of the Catastrophe? The irreparable in the Catastrophe, the irremediable, is not discouragement. It is what comes after that, a feeling that is difficult to name but is named nonetheless: the feeling of having been trampled by claws without pity, and of having been trampled collectively. It is from this that one cannot recover. We have already said this with regard to the gallows, the prisons, the resistants declared guilty and led in chains through the city. It is the feeling that justice is only redoubling the crime. The victim is therefore without recourse. The author makes this explicit by saying that it is the striving for freedom—that is, also, simply, for dignity— that was crushed, trampled. Yes, but this must be said in another way. What is truly horrific is not annihilation. Zabel Essayan will never cease repeating this. What is horrific, what makes collective murder a catastrophe for the victim and what makes of him someone who is stricken is the will to annihilation. It is this will to annihilation that is expressed in justice redoubling the crime. This is what makes the victim feel trampled, and it is readable in every aspect of the executioner, whether expressed with words or not. Again, what is catastrophic for the victim is not extermination, it is the will to extermination. It is also precisely this that is incomprehensible, ansahmaneli, undefinable, and it is this that renders the Catastrophe ansahman, infinite. Indeed, everything can be said with human speech, everything can be understood, pardoned, accepted, even loved. Only one thing remains beyond all speech, beyond every power to integrate, beyond all human apprehension. This thing is not death, it is not murder or burned houses, it is not even extermination. It is the will to extermination. What disintegrates people (for the stricken is the one who, in the most immediate, concrete, and violent way, undergoes the experience of disintegration) is therefore not extermination as such, although one forgets this too quickly and too frequently (and one tries to prove that the extermination did indeed take place, that it resulted in this or that many deaths, as if the essential matter

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rested there); what disintegrates is not the deaths in tens of thousands or in millions. No, it is the will to annihilate, because it cannot be integrated into any psychological, rational, or psychical explanation whatever. This is also why historical and political interpretations of the event, while they are always necessary, carry so little weight. They are at best contextual. They can never articulate the most profound experience, that of the stricken, of the infinite-undefinable, of the being trampled through several generations. What disintegrates forever, for generations, is having been at one time, whether oneself or one’s father, the target of a will to annihilation, a will that never drops its mask before the eyes of a third party and is thus all the more arrogant and impertinent. No one before, or even after, Zabel Essayan has said this with such clarity and precision. What disintegrates is the interdiction of mourning. When justice redoubles the crime, it does nothing other than to announce this interdiction. COLLECTIV E MOURNING AND SELF-SACRIFICE

Chapter 3 of Among the Ruins describes a scene of collective mourning. The image involved is once again the assembled crowd located at the center of the narration, the description or the testimony (I myself do not know what to call the genre adopted by Zabel Essayan). It was the first Sunday at Adana. Beginning at daybreak, the crowd of the stricken was thronging into the church’s courtyard. Their heads bowed, desperate, the widows advanced in a line toward the church with slow and anxious steps: the patriarchal delegate, Father Knel, had promised to perform the office of a requiem for the peace of the departed souls and for the comfort of those in mourning. An intense emotion hovered around the unhappy crowd, for the swelling pain had awoken in their hearts as in the first days, and each one had several deaths to mourn. . . . In this destroyed, annihilated city, the high tower of the Armenian Episcopal church, the only one left standing, seemed to contemplate the surrounding ruins. The bell, now silent, hung down like a paralyzed tongue. Since the catastrophe, its sounds, whether sad or joyous, had been ceased as a sign of mourning. . . . A dense crowd, made up almost entirely of widows and orphans, filled the nave, the narthex and the gallery. The infinite rows of these heads in mourning, covered with veils or with white scarves, were agitated by a stormy undulation. In the crowd of these women dressed in rags, unfortunate and pitiful, the men were exceptions, and most of them were mutilated, dismembered. . . . There were also present many churchmen of various confessions—Catholic, Protestant, Greek, Syrian Orthodox and Chaldean,34 all gathered in the Suffering Church of the Illuminator,35 in order to offer prayers for the peace of the souls of the recent martyrs and to commune in the expression of this limitless sorrow, which had abolished all the barriers separating these confessions. This tableau recalled the first centuries of Christianity. The traces of the blood spilled by

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the novices and the victims had not dried and it was as if their souls were rising with the waves of the incense.36

The phrase “this limitless sorrow, which had abolished all the barriers” reads in Armenian: ayn ansahman vsˇti artayaytut ean me¯
, or k andac ¯er bolor . . . sahmanner@37

It is once again a question of the “limit.” Here, collective mourning abolishes limits. After disintegration, what is at stake is the reintegration of all into a unity communing around spilled blood, one’s own spilled blood. But this is in any case a strange “communion.” Zabel Essayan is perfectly aware of the enormity of what she is saying here, of the “originary” character of gathering in the blood, based on sacrifice, since she compares this community that communes in self-sacrifice to that of the first Christians. It is a very peculiar scene in that it suddenly abrogates the murder and violence that was undergone. At the very least, it superimposes two types of sacrifice: that which I just referred to as a self-sacrifice and that which is represented by the Christian mass. One could conclude that the author identifies these “victims” with martyrs. This would be a false impression: at no time does Zabel Essayan suggest that these people died for their faith. That is not the idea being expressed here, quite obviously. The blood that was spilled is that of an originary sacrifice, which equates this communing community with the original one. I translated as “novices” the Armenian word Uxtuacner@. In reality, those who participate in this communing community are those who have sealed an Alliance (Uxt) of blood, or who reconstitute the originary Alliance, who reinvigorate it. What is this originary Alliance? It is evidently the one that assembles a people as such. In Armenian, “assemble” is ˇzolovel. The “people” (zˇolovurd) means, etymologically, “what is assembled.” Never again will Zabel Essayan express this idea, but she expresses it here with all the desired force: the idea of an originary Alliance that “constitutes” a people, which one can experience only when one touches bottom in pure destruction. This Alliance that makes up the originary assembly is what she calls the “race,” in conformity with her entire generation’s conception of this term. One must forget for a moment the connotation that has been imposed in European languages as a result of this term’s use in discourses of racism. But even this does not make the “communion” described by Zabel Essayan any less strange. “I abandoned myself to the waves of sorrow and I felt that my individuality was dissolving little by little into the collective suffering. A new voice sounded in my mind and I was harshly awakened to a new consciousness. . . . It is then that I communed with the true destiny of my Race.”38 This is an originary communion in self-sacrifice. The ambiguity of sacrifice must not lead us to forget that the communion in the originary Alliance is

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realized in the consciousness of pure destruction. The assembly is here, but it is the inverse side of disintegration. Now, it is at this moment that the multiple speech she had previously heard ceases to consist of fragments and scraps, powerless in relation to the totality. She relives the event. It is the only time this will happen. The imagination suddenly ceases to be powerless before the infiniteundefinable catastrophic event. Until now, she says, she has remained a stranger to suffering. This is when the officiant, turned towards the assembly, said, while making the sign of the cross: “May peace be with you. . . .” Oh, the sigh of hope39 that greeted these words of comfort. The mass of people was shaken in their depths and tears began to flow gently over their cheeks. That is when I relived all the infernal torments that had been recounted to me the previous days and from which I had remained distant and estranged. In this very same church . . . the terrified people, fleeing their pursuers, had gathered. That day too the women were most numerous, and each time the sound of a rifle was heard through the walls, they did not know which one among them was becoming a widow at that moment. . . . 40

Suddenly, she superimposes the two moments when one asks for forgiveness for one’s sins before dying: the moment when the assembled people are in fact going to die in the fire and the flames; and the moment when the officiant pronounces the words of peace. It is then that she is no longer distant and estranged from what has been recounted to her. This has required a repetition of the drama, which is not exactly a mise-en-scène but which has an undeniable cathartic effect. At this moment, an old white-haired priest, whose legs were weak with age, stood up with renewed strength, stepped before the assembly, raised his arms to heaven. . . . “Hear me: the hour to die has come. Our Lord Jesus Christ, whose ways are inscrutable, has decreed that the innocent blood of his flock shall be spilled once more. . . . The swords have been sharpened for your throats and the executioners are drunk on carnage. In a moment, the blood which flows in your veins will run dry. . . . Bow your heads and ask for absolution for your sins. . . . The last hour has rung and God’s mercy is infinite. . . .”41

The juxtaposition of these two moments, the past and the present, the repetition of the drama and the effects of cathartic identification that result—all of this taken together constitutes perhaps a literary procedure. This procedure is precisely that of representation for the purpose of mourning. Zabel Essayan herself does not, however, present it as a “literary” procedure, since she describes an experience of identification. In that experience, she relives the moment of supreme decomposition, lived today in the other

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direction, since it is the repetition of this moment that allows her to enter into communion with her assembled people. Later, she says: In the deafening and repeated noise of the rifles and in the fanatical screams of the enemy, the voice of the old priest is drowned out for a moment, but he continues to ask in a hoarse voice for the absolution of the sins of his prostrate people. In my enflamed imagination, that day and this one blend together, for the assembly, now too, is prostrate (Boc’avar.uac erewakayut’eans me¯
k@ ˇsp’ot’uin ayn o¯r@ ew ays o¯r@, orovhetew darjeal ˇzolovurd@ xonarhac ¯e ew inkac ¯e getin), their heads on the ground, like a field of harvested wheat bushels. Near the altar, the sharp voice of the officiant rises to heaven: “I prostrate myself before the Lord and I adore him. . . .”42

The two days blend together, the one when everything is about to be burned and reduced to ashes and the one when the community communes, as if each were the pure inverse of the other. Finally, it is indeed imagination that is at work here; Zabel Essayan refers to it explicitly. It is the imagination that brings about the confusion and the juxtaposition of the two moments. Imagination would thus be the “faculty” that presides over identification. And yet this cathartic identification, this representation for the purposes of mourning, seems to possess an “originary” character that is recomposed for her, but recomposed only by way of the experience of her decomposition, her disintegration by fire and madness. Nor is it in any way a theme of “consolation.” Of course, Zabel Essayan seems to suggest that, nevertheless, a certain mourning is accomplished already in this way, collectively. But this theme of the originary assembly as the inverse side of disintegration is once again beyond mourning, both possible and impossible. In addition, one finds here another theme, that of divine will, which in fact only redoubles the confusion. This could be the familiar theme of the absence of God, as an interpretation of the disaster: “What an accumulation of sins did they have to expiate such that God remained deaf and silent, as if he had absented himself from the holy place?”—an excessively violent theme, which returns later in the book, during the narration of the pogrom of Osmaniè, where, she says, someone had written on the wall of the church at the last moment: “Now there is no longer a God. . . .” The juxtaposition and the confusion of images are all the more strange. The regained community is compared to that of the first Christians, while the scene that it repeats is one of the total absence of divine will in favor of his people. The juxtaposition of the two terms—on the one hand, communion and Alliance in the presence of a divine third party and, on the other, its absolute negative, the absence of divine will—is expressed here again, literarily and literally, at the moment when the fire is set: “Suddenly a luminous and

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blazing revelation appeared on the walls. . . . They had set fire to it, the city was burning, everything was lost.”43 It is the fire of destruction, and yet the word that announces it is revelation. Pure destruction is juxtaposed and blended with the revelation and apparition of the divine. In another sense, it is thus once again the originary Alliance that is named. The imagination is at work. It blends and confuses opposites, proceeds by making antipodes coincide. The “limits” of the imagination here seem suddenly abolished. Has mourning been realized? Is it realized at the price of self-sacrifice? Is that what catastrophic mourning is? Is it realized at the price of the pure destruction actualized in the writing, in the narration? And if the narration is a testimony, then to what does it bear witness? Does it bear witness to divine violence, this pure violence of which Walter Benjamin spoke?44 But this pure violence is also something on which no law can be founded, from which no legislation can be derived, and on which, consequently, no “assembly” can be effectuated. It is a pure experience—the experience of a pure destruction, of an infinite loss, without mourning, without dialectic. NOTES

Translator’s Note: With regard to the first heading, “The Interdiction of Mourning,” it should be mentioned that the French word interdiction comes from the verb interdire, which means to prohibit or to forbid (see the May 1968 slogan: “Il est interdit d’interdire,” it is forbidden to forbid); but it can also mean, especially in the form interdit (which the author uses frequently and which I also translate as interdiction), being dumbfounded or stymied, stricken to silence, unable to respond, and so forth. Thus an “interdit” is speech (-dit) that comes between (inter-) someone and something they would do, but it is also what comes between someone and his or her own speech (“barring” speech, as I translate once below), making it impossible to know what to say, reducing one to silence. The importance of this connotation will be very clear in what follows. 1. There are many English translations of Avedis Aharonian (1866–1948), but they have never been collected into a volume. See the bibliography edited by Goeffrey Goshgarian in Armenian Review (Boston) 38, no. 1 (spring 1985): 73–75. 2. To my knowledge there are no translations of Bartevian (1876–1921) into French or English. See the chapter devoted to him in Rubina Peroomian, Literary Responses to Catastrophe: A Comparison of the Armenian and the Jewish Experiences (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993), 117–50. 3. For the English translations of Siamanto (1878–1915) published in journals or in anthologies, see Armenian Review 38, no. 1 (spring 1985): 112. See also Bloody News from My Friend, translated into English by Peter Balakian and Nevant Yaghlian (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996). 4. Here is an abridged list of the books written soon after the massacres in Cilicia. In Armenian: Souren Bartevian, Kilikean arhawirk @ (The Cilician terror) (Constantinople, 1909); Arshagouhi Theotig, Amis m@ i Kilikia (A month in Cilicia) (Constantinople, 1909); Hagop Terzian, Kilikioy ale¯t@ (The catastrophe of Cilicia) (Con-

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stantinople, 1912). In French: A. Adossidès, Arméniens et Jeunes-Turcs, les massacres de Cilicie (Paris: Stock, 1910); Jean d’Annezay, Au pays des massacres, Saignée arménienne de 1909 (Paris: Bloud, 1910). In English: H. Charles Woods, The Danger Zone of Europe (London, 1911). And a book in French written by the Armenian prelate of Cilicia, Mgr Moushegh: Les vêpres de Cilicie (The vespers of Cilicia) (Alexandria: Della Rocca, 1909). 5. See the translator’s note, above. 6. Zabel Essayan, Namakner (Letters), ed. Arpik Avetissan and Sevak Arzoumanian (Erevan: University Publications, 1977). A complete (but not yet published) French translation of the correspondence of Zabel Essayan exists, prepared by Levon Ketcheyan and accompanied by an impressive amount of documentation. The whole, prepared for a thesis in Paris, will no doubt be published in the near future. One of the editors of the correspondence, S. Arzoumanian, is also the author of a monograph on the writer, entitled simply Zape¯l E¯sayean, keank @, gorc@ (Zabel Essayan, her life, her work) (Erevan: Academy Publications, 1965). This was the first time since 1937 (the year Zabel Essayan was put on trial and imprisoned) that her name was pronounced in Armenia. In the diaspora, a monograph was published by Shoushig Donabédian, Zabel Essayan ou l’univers lumineux de la littérature (Antelias, Lebanon: Armenian Catholicosate, 1988). The same author has published several short studies of Essayan in his book in Armenian, Verlucakan ¯e
er (Critical pages) (Beirut, 1987). I must also mention the chapter on Zabel Essayan by Rubina Peroomian in her book Literary Responses to Catastrophe, 89–116. Finally, one can also consult a study in French by Séta Kapoïan in Dissonanze, no. 1, Milan, 1985. This book by Zabel Essayan was published in a French translation (by Pierre TerSarkissian) under the title Les jardins de Silihdar (Paris: Seuil, 1994). 7. Zabel Essayan, Aweraknerun me¯
(Among the ruins) (Constantinople, 1911). The book has been through several editions, the latest being in the first volume of the “Works,” 2 vols. (Antelias, Lebanon: Armenian Catholicosate, 1987). I will refer to this edition as Among the Ruins, using the English translation of the title. There is an unpublished French translation by Liliane Daronian and Anne Kambourian, who attended my seminar “Littérature et catastrophe” in Paris, from 1991 to 1995. Selections from this work (notably from the first chapters, commented here) will be published in English in my forthcoming book: Writers of Disaster: Armenian Literature in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Gomidas Institute). Besides Sevag Arzoumanian and Rubina Peroomian, who wrote on Among the Ruins in the works I have already cited, Krikor Beledian has devoted some important pages to this same book in his book in Armenian, Mart (War) (Antelias, Lebanon: Armenian Catholicosate, 1997), 167–93, where certain of the themes that I will approach here (in particular the question of the “imagination” confronted with the Catastrophe, that of the “representation” of the Catastrophe, and finally the essential question of “testimony” and its status) are taken up in a fine, if not exhaustive, manner. In the same book, K. Beledian also has an essay (194–230), which is presented as a critical study of the narrative that appeared in 1924 under the title Hogis Ak soreal (My exiled soul). 8. Hagop Oshagan (born in Broussa in 1883, died in Aleppo in 1948) is one of the most important Armenian writers of the twentieth century and the first great novelist in Western Armenian. He knew firsthand the reality of Turkish Ottoman

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society, which he depicts in his novels. He first wrote short stories, collected in 1921 in the volume entitled Xonarhner@ (The humble ones), in which he takes his inspiration from the stories gathered from the marginalized “rejects” of his village, Sölöz. At the same time, he was a biting and often resented literary critic. Miraculously, he escaped deportation and death in 1915. After the war, he wanted to be the chronicler of his martyred people. He lived in Constantinople until 1922, then in Bulgaria, Egypt (until 1926), Cyprus (until 1934), and Jerusalem, and in each place he taught Armenian literature. In 1926 he began to write the series of his great novels, which culminate with Mnac ordac  (The remnants), an unfinished work of eighteen hundred pages, published in Cairo between 1931 and 1934. In 1936, he began his Hamapatker (Panorama), a work in ten volumes and five thousand pages, completed in 1944 and published successively beginning in 1945 (the tenth volume, a sort of “Ogashan in His Own Words,” was published by the Armenian Catholicosate of Antelias, in 1981). 9. This citation of Hagop Oshagan, and all those that follow, are from volume 6 of Hamapatker Arewmtahay Grakanut ean (Beirut: Hamazkaïne, 1968). Here, Hamapatker, 6: 245. 10. Hamapatker, 6: 246. 11. Hamapatker, 6: 249. 12. Hamapatker, 6: 262. It was customary, at the turn of the century, to use the word c’el (race) to designate “ethnicity, people.” Certainly, the word suggests a certain “telluric” identity of the ethnicity, that is, roughly, an identity that is not historical, as that of the “nation” is. Zabel Essayan uses it as a word among other possible ones. It is clear that there is no “racism” in her usage of it. Nevertheless, the fact that these “entrails” of the race are, according to Hagop Oshagan, brought to light precisely in the catastrophic event, or more precisely in the testimony around this event, is cause for reflection. 13. Hamapatker, 6: 249. 14. Hamapatker, 6: 272. The polemical overtone has to be recognized here. The context is speaking of the 1922 novel by Zabel Essayan, Nahanjol uzˇer (Forces in retreat), where the central topic is the movement of the Armenian volunteers enrolled in the Russian army in 1914 and the revolutionary struggle for liberation in general among Armenians, as though this movement and this struggle were responsible for the Armenian tragedy by having provoked the Turkish genocidal reaction. According to Oshagan, this shift in responsibility from the Turkish executors to the Armenian victims themselves was an effect of Zabel Essayan’s conversion to the Soviet regime in Armenia, of which she indeed became the most eminent representative in the diaspora after 1922. 15. Hamapatker, 6: 310. 16. Among the Ruins, 24–25. 17. She also writes: “It is necessary, I repeat, that we all know, for as long as we exist, the real image of our bloody country, that we look courageously and directly at what is there. What I saw and heard had the capacity to destroy a State in its foundations. Theoretically, no one says the contrary . . .” (Among the Ruins, 25). In his essay on Among the Ruins, Krikor Beledian speaks of a writing “strategy,” as if Zabel Essayan were here claiming the Ottoman fatherland (Beledian says, “the

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State”) so as to be able to speak a truth that is potentially destructive of this same fatherland. See Beledian, Mart, 173. 18. Among the Ruins, 23. 19. On the question of the domination and subjection at the heart of the empire, of “imperial” reality, I refer the reader to my essay “L’empire du sacrifice,” L’Intranquille (Paris), no. 1 (1992). 20. Among the Ruins, 24. 21. Among the Ruins, 25. 22. I will limit myself to a single quotation: “You know that, according to the terms of the Constitution, the equality of Muslims and ghiavours is assured, but you well understand that this ideal is unrealizable. The Sheriat, our historical past, and the sentiment of hundreds of thousands of Muslims, as well as that of the ghiavours themselves, raises an insurmountable barrier to the establishment of real equality. . . . There can be no question of equality as long as we have not carried out the Ottomanization of the Empire.” These are the words of Talaat Pasha, in August 1910, at the preliminary (secret) meeting held in Salonika as preparation for the meeting of the Young Turk Congress. This quotation can be found on page xviii of Arthur Beylérian, Les grandes puissances, l’Empire ottoman et les Arméniens dans les archives françaises (1914–1918) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1983). 23. This complete change in Zabel Essayan’s political commitment requires a more detailed explanation. Nothing has been published on this issue, much too delicate to be openly debated, no doubt. A true biography of Zabel Essayan will have to follow her gestures, her writings, her political contacts between 1917 and 1922 step by step in order to grasp the psychological and political turning point involved here. 24. Among the Ruins, 151. 25. Among the Ruins, 133. 26. Among the Ruins, 31. 27. Among the Ruins, 45. 28. Zareh Vorpouni (born in Ordu, by the Black Sea, in 1903, died in Paris in 1980) is a representative of what has been called the Paris School, brought together in France, as a generation, around the journal Menk (1931–34). He published a series of novels, Halacvacner (The persecuted ones) (first volume in 1929, second volume in 1967) and Ew Elew Mard (And there was man) (Paris, 1964), which is central in the history of the diaspora and which remains largely, and strangely, unknown. Gurgen Mahari (born in Van in 1903, the same year as Vorpouni, died in Erevan in 1969), a refugee in Armenia in 1915, was a victim of the Stalinist purges and spent seventeen years of his life in Siberia. Only upon his return did he write one of the great Armenian books of the twentieth century, a novel, Ayrvol Aygestanner (The burning orchards), published in Erevan in 1966, a book of memory and mourning about Van during the years preceding the Catastrophe and about the tragic retreat of July 1915. 29. Among the Ruins, 32. 30. Among the Ruins, 32. 31. Among the Ruins, 32.

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32. Among the Ruins, 32. 33. Among the Ruins, 33. 34. The Assyrians are divided into different confessions, the two main ones being those cited here: Syrian Orthodox (in Armenian, the confession and the nation are not distinguished and both are called Assori) and Chaldean. 35. In Armenian, Suffering Church, bazmacˇ arcˇ ar, is a conventional designation. The Illuminator designates Gregory the Illuminator, instrumental in the conversion of the Armenians to Christianity and founder of the Armenian Church at the very beginning of the fourth century a.d. 36. Among the Ruins, 36. 37. Among the Ruins, 31. 38. Among the Ruins, 37. 39. In Armenian: hope is rendered as tencˇ ali. Tencˇ ank  means “wish, desire,” the aspiration to something, nostalgia in a very strong sense. 40. Among the Ruins, 36. 41. Among the Ruins, 37–38. 42. Among the Ruins, 38. 43. Among the Ruins, 37. 44. Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken, 1986).

David Kazanjian and Marc Nichanian

Between Genocide and Catastrophe

This exchange was conducted between May and November 2000. We took as our primary touchstone Marc Nichanian’s essay published in this volume, “Catastrophic Mourning,” though Nichanian’s essay “Memory of the Catastrophe” (forthcoming) was also a mutual referent point. Dear Marc, I would like to start this exchange by asking you about the word—of course it is not just a word—aghed, which you translate as la Catastrophe, the Catastrophe (I notice you capitalize it in French and English, though Zabel Essayan does not capitalize it in Armenian). It is a word Zabel Essayan begins to write with, as you point out, in September 1909, after her return to Constantinople from three months in Cilicia, three months in which she witnessed—naming what she witnessed is so precarious and urgent, as your essay carefully traces—the remains, the cinders of the April 1909 pogroms. I think many, certainly Armenians in North America and perhaps in Europe, have forgotten or perhaps repressed this word, supplanting it with the now familiar word—again not just a word—Genocide. I have so many questions about these words, aghed, la Catastrophe, the Catastrophe, and Genocide, so forgive the proliferation, and begin wherever you like. Can you say something about your translation of aghed, about why you insist, in “Catastrophic Mourning” and elsewhere, on la Catastrophe, the Catastrophe? How is your translation a response to the forgetting or repression of aghed and its supplantation by Genocide? What has been lost in this supplantation?

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Dear David, You know, this “conversation” through e-mail will be difficult for me, simply because e-mail supposes an immediacy, a naturalness, that is not given to me in general and least of all in the English language. Moreover, your questions are not (or will not be, I presume) of the sort that allow quick answers. About the word Aghed, then. Zabel Essayan uses the word without any emphasis and, yes, without capitalizing it. For her, the word best characterizes what happened. But it is not a proper name for what happened. She uses other words as well. The truth is that she has no word for properly naming what she is witnessing for. In my essay on her, I spent some time on the expression ansahmaneli, which comes over and over in the first chapters of her book on Cilicia. What happened, she says, is indefinable. Which also means that it is unnameable. But in ansahmaneli, there is the word sahman, whose usual meaning is “limit” and less usual meaning (in classical Armenian) is “law.” What happened is beyond the limits of human apprehension, human imagination. What I tried to suggest is that what happened was—for her and consequently for us—beyond the human possibilities of mourning. It’s beyond the human law of mourning. And I insist on this particular connection: mourning is a law or has a law in itself. This law does not belong to the realm of common law, the law of the city, of the state. Do I need to repeat here the whole problematic of the law of mourning, as stated perhaps for the first time in the Western world by Sophocles in his Antigone? Mourning is what constitutes the human for humans. The gap of inhumanity (before all belonging to a human group, to a community, cohered by its own laws) suddenly opens up before our eyes when we consider this minimal difference introduced between Oedipus’s sons by the interdiction of mourning. It is the difference between human and not human. Sophocles says: Man is the most monstrous (or the most uncanny) of all beings in the world. Why is it so? Because he can relate himself to his own death, his own disappearance. This “relation” does not come up in death “itself,” in rites of mourning, in the confrontation with the death of the individual, but rather in this extreme moment where and when mourning has been forbidden. This moment is the moment of Catastrophe. You know that I do not invent my words and my translations. “Catastrophe” is the translation of Aghed in Armenian, that is all it has in it. The pogroms of 1909 were not given that proper name by Armenians, who had not realized yet that it was but the first manifestation of a stubborn will to exterminate, that is, to dislocate them, to deprive them once and for all of their humanity. For the first time in the twentieth century, victims and executioners alike, each in their own ways, were experiencing the law of mourning and the catastrophic loss of law. The victims were on one bank, the executioners were on the other bank, already distributed and secretly

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separated in their respective roles by the invisible denial of mourning—on the one side, under the guise of an interdiction, but on the other side, under the guise of a denial of this very interdiction. Nobody can accept the fact that he has been destroyed in his very humanity, that the founding law that originally brought him up to humanity has been withdrawn from him. This also means, despite the current rhetorical claims, appeals, and assertions, that for the victims there can be no real memory of what happened. Whoever affirms that there is or there can be or there must be a memory of the Catastrophe simply lies and repeats the initial denial of mourning. For the victims, memory is necessarily, constitutively a denial—a denial of the Catastrophe, a denial of the fact that they have been deprived of the law of mourning. Hagop Oshagan says this very clearly in one sentence: History is nothing but a series of denials. Of course, he did not really mean what he said there. He probably meant “history” as it is written by and for civilized humanity. And if you want a more conspicuous example, see Freud’s last published book, Moses and Monotheism, where he describes and characterizes “tradition” as denial. Denial of what? Of course, denial of Catastrophe. Does Freud use the word? Yes, only once, without emphasis, without capitalizing it, but he uses it, unmistakably. Now I repeat: If there is a loss, it can only be the loss of a law. The catastrophic loss is the loss of the law of mourning. And what makes it “catastrophic” is not the loss itself, in itself. There is no recovering from this loss. What makes it catastrophic is the fact that it has to be denied, that it is denied in the very moment when it happens. This is why “Catastrophe” is but the secret name of what happened. Yes, the survivors are sometimes using this name as a proper name for the event, but very scarcely. They are using it among other proper names: Yeghern (this word has no translation; it is the usual word for “pogrom,” but it seems that its root is the past form of the verb to be, as though Yeghern was the Event par excellence), Medz Yeghern, Darakrutiun (Deportation), Aksor (Exile), Chart (Massacre), and others, and today most scandalously Tseghaspanutiun (Genocide). Today they are using a common name as a proper name. They do not respect the identity of the Event that has shaped them for the last eighty years. They do not respect their own memory of the Event. They are repeating every day, everywhere, in all places, the original denial of the Catastrophe. But this is part of the catastrophic structure of the survivor. By using the word “Genocide,” we survivors are only repeating again and again the denial of the loss. We probably cannot help it. We are doing what the executioner wanted us to do, from the beginning on. We claim all over the world that we have been “genocided”; we relentlessly need to prove our own death. We are still in the claws of the executioner. We still belong to the logic of the executioner, through and through.

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Now, have Armenians “suppressed” this word, Aghed? Not really. We could say so if the word had been in use at some place or some time during this century and had been supplanted by (for me) the ominous and disgusting one of “Genocide,” ominous and disgusting because of its use as a proper name. But this is not really the case. Aghed is the name-to-be, the name that will come in the future, in a nonassignable future. Aghed is the name that will come at the end of history, when history as a series of denials will come to an end. And this is not for tomorrow, you know! Aghed would have been supplanted if there were a memory of Catastrophe, but there is none, as I have explained. The Catastrophe is to come, it is for the future, it is the Zu-kunft, it has yet to happen, we have to work in order to make it happen. Of course, it is a past event. But it does not belong to our past. It defines the past of the future. A past event that is still to happen? How is this possible? But yes, this is possible. Again, how? For instance, it is made possible by having people read Hagop Oshagan, in Armenian or in any other language—it does not matter much in this case. He was the first one to use the word systematically as a proper name for the event. This happens in an interview of 1931, where he gives some information about his novel Mnac ordac  (The Remnants), and in his monograph of 1944 on Aram Andonian. I will come back to this later if you deem it convenient or necessary. As for now, let me say that Aghed is a secret word for the event, among other reasons because the work of Hagop Oshagan has never been read. Was it addressed to Armenian readers? Was it addressed to the world at large, the civilized humanity? I do not know. “It has never been read” means that it has never been valued as the opening up of the Catastrophe as a horizon of reading for us, Armenians, for us, people of goodwill. This horizon will open up in commentaries, in translations, tomorrow, perhaps. This is to say that we are only on the eve of an age when perhaps an understanding of and for the Catastrophe will be possible. Only a fledgling understanding of what it means to lose, to be deprived of, the law of mourning will enable us to understand that we were founded on the law of mourning.

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Dear Marc, First, thank you for conducting this exchange primarily in English, the one language we do share most easily, though we come to it differently. It occurs to me that our different languages—Armenian, French, German, Spanish, English—say a great deal about “diaspora.” But that is not the topic in the foreground here. I am tempted to take up immediately your question: “Aghed is the nameto-be, the name that will come in the future. . . . A past event that is still to

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happen? How is this possible? But yes, this is possible. Again, how?” But to do so would be to rush things. As you wrote, “And this is not for tomorrow, you know!” I hear both a pause and an urgency in this exclamation of yours. Both “this is not for tomorrow” because it is further off, it comes to us from further away, and “this is not for tomorrow” because it is pressing, compelling, impatient, it cannot wait. (Such ambivalent polyvalence in the form of a friendly command—“you know!”—offers an epigraph for this thinking we are trying to do here.) Holding on to the sense of urgency but holding off, initially, on the question of how aghed or Catastrophe might be possible, I want first to think about the tradition that defines, defends, and deforms the Catastrophe as “Genocide”—an “ominous and disgusting word,” you wrote.

If I understand you, “Genocide” is not only “ominous and disgusting” because of what it names. In regard to “the Armenian Genocide,” the Catastrophe of which we speak, “Genocide” also performs and produces something “ominous and disgusting.” “Genocide,” here, has become an example of what it describes. It is not simply a word we use to represent an event we can know. Rather, it has become a word that represents us in our use of it. It does so by continually restaging what Essayan and Oshagan figure as the Catastrophe itself: not only the loss of the law of mourning, but also the denial of the loss of the law of mourning. “Genocide” denies this loss and so performs the Catastrophe again and again. How can such a word have such a performative effect? How can “Genocide” do such a thing, act in such a way? This is what I would like to consider here. Long after Essayan wrote of aghed as unnameable, this word “Genocide” has emerged to name, with utter confidence, the unnameable. By considering how this has happened, we are, perhaps, simply rereading Essayan, even allowing Aweraknerun me¯
(Among the Ruins) to read us. As you suggest, Antigone has shown us how humanity is constituted by mourning and how the interdiction of mourning is a denial of the human. On one hand, Creon’s claim to the authority of interdicting mourning leads to the withdrawal of his own being, particularly his entombment from the social. On the other hand, Antigone’s insistence on mourning leads her to assert her humanity, even in her entombed death. The Catastrophe of which we are speaking, then, is a loss of the law of mourning and a denial of that loss. Not just targeted mass murder, but also the withdrawal of sense from those subjected to that mass murder, the inability to name or imagine or apprehend the series of events that surround and make up that targeted mass murder. Not just the denial of those events and that Event, but also the denial of that inability to name or imagine or apprehend. Catastrophe

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is an interdiction, then, in that it comes between the stricken and their speech, their actions; they are stricken from speech and action, as Essayan’s account so carefully shows. In the years since Essayan’s work, we have become too familiar with the Turkish state’s continuing denial of the Catastrophe and thus its continuation of the denial of the loss of the law of mourning, its continuation of the denial of the unnameable. And yet among Armenians and others, the remembrance of “Genocide” has itself become catastrophic, because it repeats that denial by claiming to name the Event, to calculate and codify it in positive law and positivist history. One example of this, which Anahid Kassabian and I have written about, is the rise to prominence of the term hai tahd, “the Armenian case,” in the second half of the twentieth century. By condensing the Catastrophe into hai tahd, what Essayan labored to mourn as an unnameable Event was transformed into a “case” that could be fully and finally understood in juridical terms. Armenians emerged as plaintiffs effectively pursuing a complete admission by or a guilty verdict against Turkish defendants for a documentable and juridically determinable crime, followed, of course, by the crude calculation of reparations. Essayan’s aghed, the unnameable, was entombed within the discursive practices of positive law. It seems crucial to remember the particular character of such a verdict—not a truth-speech in general, but a delimited and limiting truth-calculation. The pursuit of such a verdict enacts its own interdict when it forgets its own tactical and limited character and generalizes itself as the only authoritative, authentic remembrance of the Catastrophe. As such, these calculations and codifications obliterate what is unnameable, unimaginable, and incomprehensible about the Event—the Event “itself.” Like the Catastrophe, they also interdict. So “Genocide” as a performative is an interdit. As an interdit, “Genocide” is not itself a silence; rather, it imposes a silence by entombing the Event within the pursuit of a calculable verdict. What is the legacy of imposing such a silence? I am very interested in one of the ways you figure this imposition: you write that “we relentlessly need to prove our own death.” The incessant iteration and reiteration of the discursive practices of hai tahd offer one example of such relentlessness. Hence, as you say, “They”—the calculators and the codifiers—“do not respect the identity of the Event that has shaped them for the last eighty years.” To respect such an Event would be, at the very least, to respect the limits it imposes on comprehension. By pointing to Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, you allowed me to reread a remarkable passage that speaks to us here. In his discussion of traumas that are forgotten in such a way that they continue to produce neurotic identities, Freud writes that “early trauma—defence—latency—outbreak of neurotic illness—partial return of the repressed” have

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a compulsive quality: that is to say that they have great psychical intensity and at the same time exhibit a far-reaching independence of the organization of other mental processes. . . . they are insufficiently or not at all influenced by external reality, pay no attention to it or to its psychical representatives, so that they may easily come into active opposition to both of them. They are, one might say, a State within a State, an inaccessible party, with which cooperation is impossible, but which may succeed in overcoming what is known as the normal party and forcing it into its service.1

Freud calls this situation an “incapacity for living.”2 Certainly this “State within a State” recalls Creon, in all his inaccessible despotism and his eventual incapacity for living, claiming for himself the power of the divine law and exercising the sovereign performative. In our context, it also recalls the complex genocidal machinery constructed by the Ittihad ve Tirakki party in order to wrap the massacres of Armenians in deniability, a structure you have detailed in your “Memory of the Catastrophe”: the party itself, the Central Committee within the party, the Special Organization within the government, and the further subdivisions within the Special Organization. Yet what is most disturbing is that this “State within a State,” this “incapacity for living,” also characterizes the incessant discursive practices of “Genocide.” Is it here, perhaps, that we encounter what you call the executioner’s logic: “We are doing what the executioner wanted us to do”; “We are still in the claws of the executioner. We still belong to the logic of the executioner, through and through”? An “incapacity for living” that lives on and on. I even hear in this passage from Freud a trace of the relationship between Antigone and Creon, to the extent that they are locked in their mutual obstinacy, both fated for entombment. Would you like to say more about how this logic functions? What kind of insanity is this that forever seeks to prove one’s own death?

Even as we consider how the logic of the executioner functions, even as we respect the limits the Event imposes on comprehension, there is that urgency to the Catastrophe as a “name-to-be.” I invoke the second sense, mentioned above, of your “And this is not for tomorrow, you know!”—the urgency. In your reading of the scene of collective mourning in chapter 3 of Essayan’s text, you characterize the juxtaposition of “two moments” (communion–Alliance–divine will and the absence of divine will) as a “representation for the purpose of mourning.” Here, then, we have Essayan’s rendering of the limit, the unnameable, of the Event as a limit and an unnameable. In this scene is condensed so much that is paradoxical, aporetic, and yet urgent. If this scene exceeds all the calculations and codifications of “Genocide,” if it points away from the madness of the executioner’s logic, of proving one’s own death, where does it lead us?

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You suggest in “Catastrophic Mourning” that it has a “cathartic effect,” that it enables a “cathartic identification.” But I wonder if anything clean or pure can be said to emerge from this scene, and whether we can think of such a representation as a purging of all excess, all waste? Isn’t there always an excess? If so, how do we engage that excess without reinitiating the “ominous and disgusting” compulsion of “Genocide”? Another passage from Freud becomes urgent here. At the beginning of Moses and Monotheism, Freud expresses astonishment that the apparent Egyptian origin of the name “Moses” has not led any biblical scholars to suggest that Moses could have been Egyptian: “Possibly the notion that the man Moses might have been anything but a Hebrew seemed too monstrous.”3 In a sense, Moses and Monotheism is a narration of the monstrous possibility that the foundation of Judaism is other than Jewish. Rather than purging the monstrous possibility that Moses was radically other, Freud scandalously proposes narrating that possibility. As always, Freud insists on the provisional character of his effort and thus leaves open the possibility, indeed the necessity, of other, future narrations. So Freud proposes to us a practice of narration and renarration that opposes the neurotic compulsion of the state within the state. Again, this paradoxical practice, this noncompulsive yet continual renarration, seems far from catharsis. How does Freud’s narrative practice speak to Essayan’s “representation for the purpose of mourning”? That is, if to be “Armenian” has largely become to understand the Catastrophe as “Genocide,” then would recalling the Catastrophe as Catastrophe be a confrontation with the monstrous possibility that the Event is anything but “Armenian,” that Armenians are anything but “Armenian”?

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Dear David, I am late; I needed two and more months to come to this moment, when I am again and finally taking up your letter, your questions, to try to cope with them. What did I do during these two months and more? Among many other things, I was totally stuck for a few weeks. I had to write the prefaces in English and French for my forthcoming books, Writers of Disaster (volume 1: The National Revolution) and Génocide et catastrophe, and I did not know what they would be composed of. Finally, after many weeks of hesitation, I began the book in French with an address to you, David, and Catherine [Coquio], who asked me questions about the difference between “Genocide” and “Catastrophe,” and obliged me to think anew about this very difference, although it had been my point of departure and my obsession for years. Now I will try to come back to some of your questions, first by quoting from the text of my “Memory of the Catastrophe,” which you already know.

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It is because the dimension of proof exists—this terrifying dimension of the need to prove—that we have to distinguish Catastrophe and “Genocide.” What, after all, must be proven? Not that the event was and is a catastrophe. We know that all too well and are obviously not about to prove it to ourselves. No. We have to prove that it is a genocide. But the opposite is true as well, and that is what is terrible. It was a genocide, and we need to prove it for that reason. We need to enter into the endless game of proving it, to detach ourselves from ourselves in order to come forward as proofs, as so many living proofs of our own death. There is no genocide without denial. More than that: the essence of genocide is denial. Why? Because those who conceived and carried out the extermination conceived and carried out, by the same token, the elimination of every trace of their act. In the Armenians’ case, they succeeded rather well. In this sense, genocide is an absolutely, resolutely modern phenomenon. It belongs to an age in which memory is not passed down by stories held in common, by epics, but through archives. It is because the perpetrators had already situated themselves in the modern dimension of the archive that they could contemplate eliminating every trace of their crime. Genocide exists only in this dimension. Inversely, the victim is obliged to appeal to the archive to prove that what was conceived as not having taken place did indeed take place. Why is this dimension of the archive terrible, even, in the proper sense of the term, insane? Because it in fact dispossesses the victim, the survivor, the maimed, of every memory that would be his own. No common narrative, no epic, is then possible. This is emphatically not to say that one should or could have made an epic out of the catastrophic events. One must, rather, take note of the impossibility of doing so. From the very first, starting in 1918 with Andonian, or even in 1917 with Zabel Essayan, the Armenians knew very well that the problem lay there. They would have to collect eye-witness accounts, not in order to preserve a collective memory by way of a story, but rather in order to transform these accounts straightaway into archives, into so many pieces of evidence. They were the stricken artisans of an “archivization” of memory, of this immediate transformation of memory into archive for the sole purpose of providing proof, that is, of dispossessing the victim of his own memory. Because each time a proof is requested, and a proof is constantly requested, you are again in front of the executioner; you have to give an account of your own torture, your own death under torture. And this is what the executioner wanted. You are totally caught in the logic of the executioner. There is no escape. He is in front of you. He says: speak, say the truth, give the proof. This is the precise reason that genocide is, from the first, Catastrophe. And this is also the precise reason that we have to distinguish between them. If they were not distinguished, how could I pronounce and justify the statement: “genocide is, from the first, Catastrophe”?

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There, doubtless, is where the Catastrophe lies. One needs constantly to insist upon the fact that the Catastrophe is not the genocide, so as to be able to explain that the intent to commit genocide becomes catastrophic for those who were submitted to it. The intention to eliminate, the intention to exterminate, is not catastrophic in itself. It destroys lives; it cannot destroy death. It becomes catastrophic when it destroys death, and in destroying death it destroys humanity. It contains, as a part of its very nature, in the moment it’s being carried out, its own denial, forcing the victims to enter into the game of proof, the game, precisely, of the executioner who denies, the game decided by the executioner, forcing the victims, thus, to dispossess themselves of their memory and their death, of the very possibility of mourning. Memory and death are transformed immediately into an archive that should serve as proof. All the apparent subtlety and the maddening paradox of this situation is encapsulated in the following formulation: one is obliged to prove that the genocide occurred not because it occurred and some deny this; one is obliged to prove because it was a genocide. The essence of genocide is denial. The Catastrophe stricto sensu consists in this necessity to provide proof, and certainly not in the barbarity of the crime or the number of victims, and not even in the intention underlying the act. A deliberate crime, even a collective one, is not yet a catastrophe. Inherently, genocide involves denial, before anything else. Genocide is a crime that never existed, that never took place, that never occurred as an event for anyone. For this very reason, genocide is par excellence the crime that gives rise to the compulsion to prove. The executioner that we bear in the depths of ourselves always exhorts us: Speak, say the truth, prove if you can! And we obey him incessantly. I came to the formulations about the reign of the archive very late, in 1993, in my Parisian seminar on Hagop Oshagan, when I was reading once again Oshagan’s declarations on the necessity of “hundred of books, thousands of narratives” (by survivors) for writing the Catastrophe. He was clearly saying that he would not be able to write the Catastrophe, and this was because of a very profound logic imposed on him by the reign of the archive—the necessity of taking into account the innumerable testimonies. Literature was impossible because of testimony, the necessity of integrating, of repeating the survivors’ testimonies, ad infinitum. There was a conflict between literature and testimony that remains for me, still now, somewhat mysterious. This is why I decided that I would devote a whole course (next fall) to this question, the Survivor and the Witness, and with my students at Columbia read the Holocaust survivors’ testimonial literature: Primo Levi, Robert Antelme, Jean Améry. Perhaps then I will have a more precise idea of this conflictual relationship between literature and testimony and be able to explain why the literature of the “sons,” of the second generation

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of Diaspora writers (Vorpuni, Shahnur, the Paris School in its entirety), was a literature directed explicitly against testimony. Now a few words about Zabel Essayan again. The essay that will be published in Loss only bears on the book of 1911, Among the Ruins. It puts aside another essential part of the whole question (that I developed and will publish in my book Writers of Disaster): Among the Ruins, without any doubt, is a book of testimony. But it is interesting and even necessary to know that Essayan was unable to write a single line of personal testimony after 1915. She collected survivors’ testimonies, translated them into French, made the witnesses speak, and published their testimonies as she wrote them down. But never again was she able to write a book of mourning like Among the Ruins. The reason for this reality does not lie simply in the fact that she was “on the spot,” on the place where the extermination had taken place. She had to deal with survivors in 1916 and 1917 as well as in 1909. The reason lies elsewhere. In short, she was the first bearer and translator of that implacable logic that transforms all testimonies into a discourse of proof and evidence (I had some difficulty translating discours de la preuve into English). This being said, in my essay for Loss, I do not really suggest that the scene of collective mourning has “a cathartic effect.” Essayan describes the scene as the very moment when for herself mourning effectively began. What I suggest is that, notwithstanding the literary device of juxtaposing two moments—the moment of the murder and the moment of collective wailing—there is an excess of violence that cannot be “purified” and consequently cannot be the opportunity for a new “recollection,” a new “founding” for the collectivity. Here I can only repeat my own words at the end of the essay: “. . . this pure violence is also something on which no law can be founded, from which no legislation can be derived, and on which, consequently, no ‘assembly’ can be effectuated. It is . . . the experience of a pure destruction, of an infinite loss, without mourning, without dialectic.” And finally your last two paragraphs. They have something so important in them that I will leave the whole issue for next time. What is so important in them? What you call the “monstrous possibility.”

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Dear Marc, Your delay in responding is certainly understandable. So much has been happening on your end. Of course, the sad death of your friend Vahé Oshagan, which must have spilled into the writing of your prefaces.4 As was the case last time, an urgency and a delay at once open up our exchange— loss and mourning at once. You mentioned your struggle with the prefaces to your books. I can’t

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help but think, as a preface to my installment here, of the equivocal role of Essayan’s preface (more on that below), as well as of Hegel’s equivocal discussion of the preface in his preface to the Phenomenology: “None of this can be accepted as the way in which to expound philosophical truth,” he explains, for “we must hold to the conviction that it is the nature of truth to prevail when its time has come.” Yet he nonetheless does offer us “the general principles on which everything turns” in the form of a preface, a retrospective glance written after the main text has been completed (a “prequel” indeed).5 Your discussion of proof and the archive is so crucial to our exchange, and I thank you for elaborating in your last response. I find most striking the “modernity” of the logic of genocide to which you refer. As you suggest, in an unquestionable embrace of modern, calculable, and codifiable discursive practices of justice, nationality, and historicity, Armenian narrativizations of their “Genocide” become locked in a compulsive repetition of the very discursive practices they claim to be opposing. Paradoxically, the compulsion to “update” a catastrophic history in “contemporary” terms— the uncritical “modernization” of a history and a people—incessantly reiterates the Catastrophe itself, precisely because of the deep tie between “Genocide” and the “modern.” This ought to generate a skepticism about triumphal claims to remind “us” “today” about “the Armenian Genocide,” however strategically or even tactically such claims might be justified. The U.S. best-seller Black Dog of Fate is only the most recent example—we are sure to see more.6 As we both seem to suggest, however, such “modern” reiterations of the Catastrophe’s modernity can never contain or exhaust the archive in a general sense. That is, if particular archives are part of an inexhaustible archive in general, perhaps that latter archive can always be returned to, indeed will always return to us, and will always exceed the “modern” terms of calculable and codifiable knowledge. That of which one is dispossessed in the process of collecting modern proofs—the equivocation of memory— perhaps returns to us from the archive in general. Might that eternal return—which is not simply the same “thing” returning again and again, but rather is the continual return of returning itself, as Deleuze has said of Nietzsche—spark an affirmation? What you write at the end of your last response is so crucial and turns us toward such a spark: Essayan was the first to subject herself to the discourse of proof, but also the first to stage the breaking or ceasing of that discourse as the beginning of mourning. Perhaps it is in this light—or this dawning of a light to come, as the figure of the spark suggests—that we can consider what you have termed Essayan’s role as a modern-day Antigone. I want to return to this figure of Antigone, for she appeared in your essay and has been returning again and again in our exchange. Let me trace her first emergence in your essay.

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You write that in the preface of 1911’s Among the Ruins, Essayan seems to interpret “the bloodshed [of 1909] through the idea of a resistance against the old regime and against the dictatorship, the idea of a supraethnic state in whose name ethnicity would have been sacrificed. . . . this is the only way to understand and accept what happened and to initiate mourning. Otherwise, it would mean that the interdiction of mourning is definitive, invincible (which it evidently was), that the remainderless extermination is underway. . . .” In other words, in 1911’s Among the Ruins, Essayan initially seems to represent the catastrophe of 1909 as the sacrifice of ethnicities in the name of a supraethnic or multiethnic, democratic state. She sees 1909 as the last throes of the empire, the ancien régime on its way out, as a new, democratic state is on its way in. By giving this sense to the 1909 events, she gives us a way of mourning them (even if we might be critical of such a way): we mourn the loss of life in the name of working through the ancien régime’s nationalisms and ethnicisms, in the name of a new state beyond nationalism and ethnicity. On this reading of Essayan, she can be said to lay claim to citizenship in the new state; she mourns the losses in the name of a claim of citizenship, a claim to political discourse— just as Antigone did in the face of Creon’s edict. As you also stress, after 1915–16 this position was shown to Essayan, and others of her generation, to be (to say the least) impossible. Yet, you suggest, perhaps another reading of Essayan remains. Perhaps we can read in Essayan, even in 1911, “a considerable reserve” beyond this representation of the events as a sacrifice for the state: “But beginning with her preface, Zabel Essayan expresses in muffled tones her astonishment, her scandal, her revolt, at seeing that even after being taken in hand by the new regime, the Armenians are imprisoned, persecuted, judged, condemned, and hanged.” By attending not only to the massacres, but also to the gallows and prisons that followed, she exposes a catastrophe more catastrophic than a sacrifice in the name of a new regime. “For the gallows testify to a will to annihilate all resistance, a will to grind everything into dust. It shows the presence of a collective machine on the march, against which nothing can be done.” Starting with the first chapter, then, we begin to doubt the view of the preface. For Essayan starts to emphasize the senseless, limitless character of the Catastrophe, indeed she starts to withdraw sense and imagination from it, even to dramatize the withdrawal of sense and imagination from catastrophe, to depict—the choice of verb is crucial here, so depict must be provisional—the entombment of sense and imagination within catastrophe. The Catastrophe starts to emerge not as a meaningful sacrifice in the name of a better state, but rather as a will to total extermination, a mass murder, and the interdiction of mourning for that mass murder: “To the exterior and in some sense ‘political’ response to the interdiction of mourning,

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Zabel Essayan will now juxtapose her book itself, the monument of mourning, which is in no way a political response to the interdiction. Unless we believe that when Antigone buries Polynices, she is already, or once again, carrying out a political duty.” I want to take you up on the very provisional possibility to which you admit in the second sentence above: “Unless . . .” I want to suggest that Antigone’s own claim is indeed political in some equivocal sense, and thus to urge a reading of Essayan’s “depiction” of the Catastrophe as political in a way different from the more standard, political interpretation—the claim to citizenship in a supra-ethnic state—expressed in her preface.7 In the first sentence of the above passage, you seem to suggest a progression from the “political” view of the preface to a certain nonpolitical view of the rest of the book. Yet elsewhere you say that the rest of the book refuses progressivism in its account of catastrophe: “the experience of a pure destruction, of an infinite loss, without mourning, without dialectic.” So, to read the movement from the preface to the rest of the book as a progression from the naïve political to the sophisticated nonpolitical would seem to work against the general resistance to progressivisms such as dialectics in Among the Ruins. What if we viewed the relationship between the politics of the preface and the politics of the rest of Among the Ruins not in progressive terms (as a movement from political to nonpolitical), but rather in supplementary terms, one (the rest of the book) as the differed-deferral of the other (the preface)—or, less systematically still, in equivocal terms, one the equivocation of the other? Indeed, you suggest that the preface might be ironic in relation to the rest of the book: “It is impossible to know to what degree Zabel Essayan is sincere in this preface, written after the fact.” Also, you suggest with your “Unless”—“Unless we believe that when Antigone buries Polynices, she is already, or once again, carrying out a political duty”—that another politics might be ushered in, under the guise of Antigone, with chapter 1. What would an ironic reading of politics in Among the Ruins look like? What other politics emerge in the equivocation between the preface and the rest of the text? This is my question for you. But I cannot resist a speculative and provisional answer, on which I would also invite your thoughts. To “depict” the Catastrophe as remainderless extermination and an interdiction of mourning—as Essayan seems to do after the preface—is to refuse a progressive account of sociopolitical development, to refuse a dialectical account of the kind performed by a certain Hegel in his reading of Antigone. On the other hand, to depict the Catastrophe as a heroic or cathartic or redemptive sacrifice in the name of a new, democratic state—as Essayan seems to do in her preface—is to refuse an orientalist account of the Ottomans as essentially premodern, and thus as rightfully subject to European imperialism.

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Each depiction is mutually exclusive of the other, and yet each is insufficient or unsatisfactory in crucial ways. However, together they perform an equivocation that is central to the irreducibly political—in the broadest sense—scene of the Catastrophe. Can we glean from this equivocation an other politics of an other humanity? Perhaps Essayan’s equivocation offers us not a failure of nerve, not a failure to progress, but rather a refusal to settle for standard political calculations of a call to attend to what escapes or exceeds each one of these calculably political accounts. As with Antigone, perhaps this equivocation speaks to us from the tomb. Take the scene you discuss from chapter 3 of Essayan’s Among the Ruins— a scene of entombment within the church in Adana in 1909. This scene equivocates between the community communing and pure destruction. Perhaps it is this equivocation that speaks to us of a politics neither reducible to calculation and codification—the “monstrous” discursive practices of “Genocide”—nor reduced to silence. A politics that refuses to justify the sacrifice of a people in the name of a modern state, but that also refuses to sanctify or to codify a chosen people by demonizing the Turk as absolute other. A politics of the future? From within the tomb, Antigone offered if not an imaginative resolution of her conflict, if not a coherent position with which to identify, certainly an excess or a remainder over the sentence Creon thought he had decreed. Might Essayan’s equivocation between her preface and the rest of her book, between the community communing and pure destruction in the scene from chapter 3, bear witness to that future politics? My supposed answer to my own questions has again become a series of questions! I leave them to you, then. . . .

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Dear David, Today, finally I sit before my computer and I will try to formulate a last answer to your thoughtful questions. Let me say first that I myself am astonished at the difficulty that I strongly feel, the difficulty once again to take up the whole issue and to conclude our exchange. Probably my feeling is that we established a sort of modus vivendi between us; we realized that a dialogue was possible. But we realized at the same time that this dialogue was only at its very first, elementary stage. I need to bring into the discussion so many new questions in order to problematize the issues of “memory,” “witnessing,” of the place and the position of the “witness” confronted by the modern will to exterminate, of the former history of the victim within a system of domination. And my other difficulty, you know, as usual, is with the English language, which is a formidable obstacle, like a wall of dust into which I have to run without knowing in advance what will come out, in the form of words and phrases, as though I were going to be blinded,

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language-blinded. I am like Oedipus, preceded by his daughter, who leads him, taking him by the hand through deserted lands, because he knew too much about himself and because he deprived himself of the eyes of a possible language for his new knowledge. My metaphorical blindness when I write in English is only repeating this general blindness of the survivor. Let’s begin with your question: “What would an ironic reading of politics in Among the Ruins look like? What other politics emerge in the equivocation between the preface and the rest of the text?” The preface, like all prefaces (and on this point you are right when you bring into the discussion the “prefacial” or “prefatory” structure that was first experienced and even theorized by Hegel), seeks to find a meaning in what would otherwise be purely meaningless and consequently lethal. It introduces meaning in the most usual form of an idea of “sacrifice.” If there is here a political endeavor and consciousness at work, it is two-leveled. On the first level, it has to do with the Young Turk regime and the Armenian attempt to accommodate it, to believe in bright perspectives, and to blind themselves in relation to that which was still to come. On the second level, it works against the grain of the whole book, against what had already become obvious to Essayan’s eyes, that the idea of sacrifice was thoroughly insufficient to retrieve a possible, livable meaning. But a death without meaning is the same as a death without mourning. Essayan’s experience and discovery are this equation of meaning and mourning. And despite the fact that the sacrificial interpretation is obviously flawed, Essayan’s witnessing account is still a work of mourning. It is still a work of mourning because of its groundbreaking discovery about the meaning of mourning. Mourning is the only human reality about which there can be no play of the words, no discussion, no compromise, no equivocation. There can be an experiencing of its range, of its purport, of the limits it sets and defines. And this “experience” has been very consciously carried out several times in this century by diverse “perpetrators” in diverse historical situations. You probably know these lines by Robert Antelme: “Three men: two guys to carry the dead man and the sentry. One more and it would have been a ceremony. The SS wouldn’t have permitted it. The dead mustn’t be allowed to serve as a symbol for us. Here, where there is no crematorium, our dead must disappear nevertheless. . . . Our natural death is tolerated, but no trace of it may be left behind, either in memory or in space.”8 They were “experiencing” a limit of humanity, this is very clear. But like all “experiences” of limits, this one was paradoxical as well, because there is (there should have been) no return from this limit. And you have to return in order to witness the limit, to insert it into an audible discourse for civilized humanity. If there is a new, unheard of politics that takes into account this experience and at the same time the impossibility of accounting for it, it will be (it should be) a politics of the witness. Twenty-five centuries ago, the Greeks

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had invented some sort of “politics of the witness,” with and through the invention of tragedy, the tragic representation. Their “other politics” was nothing political. Or their art was already politics precisely in the same sense as psychoanalysis is or could be politics for us. Something of their invention has been lingering until us, and probably this is why we have the uncertain, murky feeling that something can be heard today from their theater about that which I just called a politics of the witness. I assume that this is why we are still reading Sophocles’s Antigone. This is why we still devote our attention to this feminine figure, as a “representation of the limit,” that is to say: a representation of the unrepresentable. At the same time, your question about this “other politics” is induced by your implicit suggestion that theater does not offer anymore the location for this “politics” to come. If Antigone (as a theatrical figure) is a witness, today there is no possible location, no possible stage, on which she could appear and present the limit that she represents. No possible stage, I insist, and psychoanalysis as the modern repetition of the Greek effort for another politics cannot be this stage and this scene. Why not? Because the twentieth century has been the time favored by the gods when something like the genocidal will was brought forth and in the wake of this discovery nothing has remained as it was before. Theater is not theater anymore (I mean, theater as the other politics that it used to be in ancient times). Psychoanalysis cannot inhabit its philosophical tradition anymore (and cannot take the place of theater as other politics). The witness is not the witness of the historians anymore. This last remark is an echo of a strangely ambiguous article by Carlo Ginzburg, entitled “Just One Witness,” in which the Italian historian seeks at any price to preserve the old meaning of the word witness in the wake of the most terrible implementation of the genocidal will during this century.9 But if theater, psychoanalysis, and the classical institutions of memory cannot be the locations where this other politics will appear, then where is the location of it? And to sum up this first development, Essayan was very conscious that her book was a “political” one. Her brothers had been trampled to death. She wrote this book in their memory. She was standing somewhere between witnessing and mourning. She was resisting the political edict, yes, but she was resisting it only in the sense that she resisted the political interpretation of the political edict. And I myself resist, you see, any and every political qualification of what she did as a modern Antigone. Through this very resistance of hers and of mine after her, she already announced something about the Catastrophe to come, in its radical difference from any qualification of the event as a genocide. In the common denial of the Catastrophe that we encounter among survivors, as I explained with my first answer to your questions, in the common use of the word “Genocide” as a designation of what happened, we

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observe a common desire for recognition by the laws of the state and a familiar result: the optimistic and happy oblivion of the disseminating force of the Catastrophe. In the very improbable case of a happy end, thanks to the recognition of a genocide by the laws of the states (and even by an anticipated and nonexistent international law, but this is another question that I entirely put aside in the present context), the fact that we are ultimately founded on the law of mourning remains strangely dismissed, negated, condemned to be forgotten, to never appear as such. Here, very clearly, the laws of the state are working against the law of mourning. Antigone is the figure of the difference between the two, she “represents” the ontological difference. She is the living witness who speaks from within death. But at the same time the law of mourning works against itself, and this is what makes the whole matter much more complicated. In Adorno’s article on the Kulturkritik (first article of Prisms), that for several decades has been so often quoted and so rarely commented upon, when he speaks of the “barbarism” of writing poetry after Auschwitz, he obviously has in mind an understanding of poetry as a cultural activity that participates in the general forgetting of what it meant to be “less than human.” This is one of the paradoxes encountered by the witness in our century. Yes, the witness needs to speak the language that formulated the interdiction of mourning, the baseness of the victim, a language from which he or she has been excluded from the beginning on. Reproduced in this form, the paradox has nothing original in it. It does not take into account the specifics of the genocidal will in its modern form. It does not explain to us to what extent Creon’s decision has anything to do with the perpetrators’ perverted intelligence and the interdiction of mourning implicitly commanded by them at the core of the genocidal act. It does not make explicit the scene or the stage on which the “exposure” of the limits of representation and identification can be carried out. It totally puts aside the perversion of memory to which the survivor is exposed. It participates in the optimistic view of a possible discourse, or practice, or politics, of the future. But, dear David, there is no such thing. For us, survivors and heirs of survivors, the hour has passed long ago; there is no future. The language of civilized humanity is not our language. Everything that could happen has already happened. The Catastrophe is the end of all history and all politics. Minerva’s bird has sung long ago. The only thing that remains to do is to understand what happened, to denounce our being in the grasp of the perpetrator’s will, always and again. There is no remainder, no language in which the terrible silence of Zabel Essayan after 1917 could be transformed into a voice. No literary form in which the powerful limit encountered by Hagop Oshagan in 1934, when he stopped writing the novel in which he intended to (in his own terms) “approach the Catastrophe,”

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could be sublated, transformed into another language. But what we have to do, yes, is to understand how the Greeks could have an experience of the Catastrophe, twenty-five centuries before the emergence of the genocidal will. What we have to do, yes, is relentlessly to repeat the examination and exploration of the ontological difference between genocide and Catastrophe, so that the Catastrophe itself, the catastrophic dimension be never forgotten. Let us return to the questions with which we started. How could the Catastrophe be at the same time the proper name of the genocidal event that befell the Armenians at the beginning of this century and the name of an immemorial event, of which, moreover, the Greeks had an experience? Is “Catastrophe” then really a proper name? If Aghed is the proper name of the event in Armenian, how can I translate it and use the translated word again as a proper name? How could the Catastrophe as a consequence of the genocidal will be at the same time the oldest phenomenon that we have to know about? And it is indeed the oldest phenomenon, if what I said on the law of mourning and the first formalization of this law in Sophocles’s Antigone is true. Finally, if the destruction of the very possibility of validating facts as such and the originary transformation of testimony into a discourse of proof are the landmarks of the Catastrophe, how then can the Catastrophe be so old, how can it have been awaiting our approach of it, our return to it, for so long? Now I am asking you. Do you have the answers to these questions? Now let me finish with a few more words, indirectly, about the law of mourning, about paternity, and about the link that relates modern “literature” and the “disaster.” In his History (book I, chapter 85), Herodotus writes that Croesus, king of Lydia (who died in 546 b.c.), had a mute son. He tried everything that was possible to cure him, but in vain. He even sent messengers to Delphi so they might question the Pythoness. She answered: “Don’t desire to listen in your home to your son’s voice. Nurture the hope that his lips never open. For he will speak for the first time on the day when life and death will be decided for you.” Later, the kingdom of Lydia was invaded by the Persians. The last battle was going to terminate Croesus’s kingdom, destroy his last bastion. A soldier recognized Croesus and raised his sword to kill him. At this very moment, the mute son, who had never before abandoned his muteness, who had always remained enclosed in it, opened his mouth in terror, and for the first time in his life pronounced human words. He cried out, he screamed: “Don’t kill him, he is Croesus.” This story of a mute son obsessed the eastern Armenians in the nineteenth century. In 1829, in a letter, Nerses Ashtaraketsi, patriarch of the Armenians, retold this story and transformed the son’s outcry somewhat. He made him say: “Don’t kill him, he is my father.” He used this story as an allegory in order to express his own powerlessness, his own impotence

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in the face of the disastrous state in which his people lived. After him, Abovian recounted the story of Croesus’s mute son at least twice: The first time, when he was a student at the University of Dorpat between 1830 and 1836, he came across it in a book on ancient history, which he translated from German to Armenian. He then used the story again at the beginning of the preface of his novel, Verk Hayastani (Wounds of Armenia), written in 1841. This novel was published in 1858, ten years after the author’s death. It has always been considered the initiating step of modern literature among the Armenians, the initiating step of their literature into the modern vernacular. Thus, at the opening of the novel, at the very opening of modern Armenian literature, we find this impressive story of a mute son, of a devastated kingdom, of a father about to be killed. Abovian, like the patriarch Nerses before him, did not correctly read Herodotus’s story. He needed to believe that the son opened his mouth to save the father. But when the son opened his mouth, he could not save anything anymore. The end was already there. The kingdom had already been devastated. The son opened his mouth because the father was about to die before his eyes. The devastation of the kingdom must be linked in one way or another to the muteness of the son. If not, what would be the meaning of this whole story? The son opened his mouth at the very moment when the father was about to die. He opened his mouth to cry out that the father was dying. To cry out that it was the father who was dying. Abovian does not want to know anything about that, even though he repeats faithfully the story. That is the reason the story goes far beyond him, far beyond the allegorical interpretation he gives of it. Nowhere else has the terrible consciousness of an irretrievable disaster ever been expressed as well as in this preface. This disaster remains largely incomprehensible to us. We do not understand why it happened, why the son is mute. However, the story that fascinated Abovian so much says it very clearly. It says: the disaster is the disaster of the father. The son’s muteness is the father’s disaster, not yet revealed. The Pythoness expressed the same thing in her magnificent manner: the son’s muteness will cease at the very moment when the father’s disaster will be revealed, will be effective. It is because the story says this so clearly that it fascinates Abovian so much and that it fascinates me so much as well. I tell the story to myself repeatedly; I pronounce the son’s words: it’s my father, he is dying. The father holds in his hands the keys of the kingdom. He is the keystone of the collectivity. This keystone is collapsing, tumbling down, before the eyes of the son. It has always already been collapsing. In the birth of modern literature, the essential feature is certainly the fact that this collapse, this tumbling down addressed to us from the origin on, becomes in some way perceived, registered. It is the only place where it could be registered. Who would have ever known that the son was mute, that the disaster of the father

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was already rampant if the son had not suddenly cried out? Yes, who would have ever known anything about the disaster? Modern literature, at the moment of its birth, under Abovian’s pen, in this splendid story of a dying father and a screaming son, is the strange and paradoxical activity that announces, that finally reveals, the disaster. The same is probably true for all literature. Literature is that scream, that crying out, which accompanies, for all eternity, the father’s death. Literature does not save the father! It saves the “disaster.” Do you understand the difference? David, when I accepted your proposition to have a written conversation with you, I did not expect that it would last so long and that I would have such a hard time answering your questions. My hope was that it would be an opportunity to sum up the ideas through which I tried myself to find my own way. In part, our conversation fulfilled its role. I wrote the preface of Génocide et catastrophe on the basis of the summary that I offered you in my first installment. This preface, in turn, and the whole book as well were the bases for the answers I tried to bring to our subsequent questions. But you see, I have had some difficulty in answering your last set of questions. I needed time, more time than what should have been allotted to me for an answer. This is also one of the consequences (or perhaps the prerequisites?) of the Catastrophe. Let us formulate it in very simple words: the political prohibition was not in the first place pronounced in the language of civilized humanity. We are looking for an intelligibility of this prohibition, which means that we are transferring it into the language of our communication, a civilized language, something that we have in common, you and I. We are translating the uncivilized into a civilized language, we are translating Essayan into English, we are translating the prohibition into an audible command that belongs to the public sphere. Too many translations at the same time. I am lost. Lost in Translation is the title of a recent autobiography (Eva Hoffman). No public sphere, yes. And I understand that we are desperately seeking to re-create a public sphere for a modicum of intelligibility. But look: without a public sphere, how can you imagine that a politics, albeit “another” politics, can ever be possible?

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Dear Marc, I wish we had time to discuss the richness of your last response, in particular the curious displacement it performed: the displacement of a daughter’s prophetic entombment by a mute son finding his voice and founding a national literature. Let me risk playing the role of the bad son, or even the daughter leading her father “through deserted lands,” as you put it, and briefly try again to turn us toward Antigone. I am fascinated by, but do not understand, your insistence that “there is

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no such thing” as “the optimistic view of a possible discourse, or practice, or politics, of the future.” It seems to me that any invocation of Antigone— and you first invoked her in reference to Essayan—is an invocation of prophecy, since all discourses on Antigone are saturated by the figure of prophecy as much as by the figure of mourning. And it seems to me that prophecy is irreducibly about the future, about prefiguration, about a speech act that plays a role in bringing about the ambivalent future it seems simply to describe. So I do not understand how there is no such thing as a politics of the future in this context. How can one foreclose futurity while invoking Antigone? I also wonder what is the status of such a claim as there is no such thing as a politics of the future? Indeed, isn’t the claim “But, dear David, there is no such thing as ‘the optimistic view of a possible discourse, or practice, or politics, of the future’ ” itself a prophecy, itself a very precise politics of the future? How else is one to read your claim? And if so, what does it mean to prophecy an end to all prophecies, an end to all prefiguration? What is the status of a prophecy to end all prophecies?

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Dear David, Thank you so much for your answer. “There is no such thing. . . .” It does not seem to me that I was referring to a politics of a future, as you put it (I am reading Derrida’s “Politics of Friendship” for other reasons, and to say that politics has no future would be all the more ridiculous after this reading). But perhaps, finally, we have attained a point where we don’t agree or do not understand each other. Even if I do not know what the real disagreement is. It probably lies in my instinctive retreat from and distaste of everything that could resemble optimism and a political retaking-over of the issues discussed. Then I owe you one more development of “There is no such thing . . . ,” because I have to remember what the “such thing” is. What does this have to do with our central question about the difference between genocide and Catastrophe? Does this difference cover or recover the difference between the law of the state and the law of mourning? In the modern position of the Witness, the law is at stake, the law as such. Le droit. What is it that we call “the right” as in “Philosophy of the right” (or is it “Philosophy of Right”)? Does the witness, in his claim to be heard and his certitude of not being heard, call for an existing right, law, or for a right to come, always and ever to come? And the other side of the same question: What does the genocidal will will? But you understand that these two questions (or two sides of the same question) would oblige us to discuss something that was not immediately implied by our point of departure in the question of loss (loss of the law of mourning). In the last chapter of the third volume of the 1948 book Die Totale Herr-

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schaft, Hannah Arendt writes on the concentration camps. She describes something that does not belong anymore to politics as we are used to understanding the word. Her insistence is on the fact that we have to try to think something that is beyond the traditional working of political power. Wolfgang Sofsky in his book The Order of Terror offers a description of the camps that is sociological as to the tools and the concepts, but in fact repeats Arendt’s idea about “absolute power,” which of course aims at destroying everything political. But it is a description, only a description, only using operative concepts like “absolute power.” We have to measure up to the will of the perpetrator; we have to discover it. We can never be rid of the task. This is the other side of the distinction between genocide and Catastrophe. It’s strange, David. Everybody seems to know what “Genocide” means. But nobody cares about the genocidal will. Nobody is able to recognize it when it appears here and there. The genocidal will is totally ignored (in its essence and its manifestations) in our modern world, despite the fact that our modern history has been plagued by genocides. The question about what the genocidal will is is simultaneously a question about the right, the law, the necessity of a law, of an anticipatory law. Does the questioning about the anticipatory structure of law (to which the modern witness essentially witnesses) have anything to do with prophecy? That is my question to you now. I have never understood what the word prophecy means. Here lies my weakness. NOTES

1. Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 23, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), 76. 2. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 77. 3. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 9. 4. Vahé Oshagan (born in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, in 1922; died in Philadelphia on June 30, 2000) was a diasporan Armenian writer, one of the most important in the second half of the twentieth century. He was a poet who established new milestones and invented a completely personal language. He also was a scholar and an intellectual, concerned with the destiny of his people. See Marc Nichanian, “In Memoriam Vahé Oshagan,” Armenian Review 47, nos. 1–2 (summer 2001): 167–71. 5. Georg Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 1–2. 6. Peter Balakian, Black Dog of Fate (New York: Broadway Books, 1997). 7. See Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). 8. Robert Antelme, The Human Race, trans. Jeffrey Haight and Annie Mahler (Marlboro, Vt.: Marlboro Press, 1992), 92. 9. Carlo Ginzburg, “Just One Witness,” in Probing the Limits of Representation, ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 82–96.

Dana Luciano

Passing Shadows Melancholic Nationality and Black Critical Publicity in Pauline E. Hopkins’s Of One Blood

The turn-of-the-century fiction writer and cultural critic Pauline E. Hopkins began her publishing career with a call for realism in the artistic depiction of African Americans. Justifying realist fiction as simultaneously a defense against erasure and a means of productive intervention in history, Hopkins opened her first novel, Contending Forces: A Romance of Life North and South, with the following claim: Fiction is of great value to any people as a preserver of manners and customs— religious, political and social. It is a record of growth and development from generation to generation. No one will do this for us; we must ourselves develop the men and women who will faithfully portray the inmost thoughts and feelings of the Negro with all the fire and romance which lie dormant in our history, and as yet, unrecognized by writers of the Anglo-Saxon race.1

Though Hopkins’s defense of the practical value of fiction begins by echoing the wisdom of late nineteenth-century advocates of realism, it is suddenly disrupted by an impassioned insistence on black self-expression as the key to an as-yet-unspoken deeper truth. It is no surprise, then, that Hopkins’s fourth novel, Of One Blood, or, The Hidden Self, which was serialized in the Colored American Magazine from November 1902 to November 1903, moves beyond the narrative conventions that dominate late nineteenth-century African American fiction—the politicized romance and the “passing” story—into the realm of historical fantasy. With a plot that turns upon haunting, hypnosis, and the return of the dead to life, the discovery of hidden, fractured racial and familial ties among a trio of melancholic mulatto main characters, and the reemergence, after five thousand years, of a lost Ethiopian civilization, the originary ancient source of all modern scientific and artistic knowledge, the novel is obvi148

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ously not aiming for the type of mimetic realism lauded by Progressive Era fiction writers. Between the demand for realistic “preservation” with which Contending Forces opens and the fixation upon paranormal and supernatural phenomena that marks Of One Blood, published only two years later, lies an apparent incongruity; it might seem that Hopkins had abandoned her own mandate. Yet the transition mapped in the passage above, from an insistence on the need to record the observable “manners and customs” to a search for ways of representing the impalpable “inmost thoughts and feelings” of African Americans, required, finally, a transposition of the realist topography, accounting for the fantastic “fire and romance” of the later novel. This attempt to address the workings of the psyche led Hopkins well beyond the conventions of realism, since neither canonical realist literature (as she points out) nor contemporary psychological theory offered a sufficient model. If psychological theory could not itself provide an adequate account of black psychology, however, it could and did provide some of the ground for Hopkins to develop her own powerful account of racial melancholia. Melancholia, traditionally understood as insurmountable mourning, is transformed, in Hopkins’s work, from an individual pathology to a historical condition—the very condition, indeed, of being historical.2 The melodrama enacted in Of One Blood narrates the unspoken and as-yet-unrecognized trauma of historical and racial separation, deploying melancholia as a symptom exposing the abject underside of American history. Melancholia, indeed, comes to seem less a pathology than a realistic response to racial conditions in the United States in the last part of the nineteenth century. In Hopkins’s account, however, melancholia operates not only as a critical condition directing attention to the psychic impact of racial segregation and silencing, but also, paradoxically, as a generative force shaping a revisionary engagement with black cultural history. The narrative exuberances that characterize Of One Blood do not constitute an attempt to flee the concrete material problems of late nineteenthcentury African Americans in favor of romantic escapism, disguised by a fillip of Pan-African political consciousness, as some critics have contended.3 The novel’s revisionary deployment of sensationalist and Gothic conventions represents not an antirealist digression but a protorealist intervention. Immersed as it is in contemporary psychological and philosophical discourses about the nature of the self and the meaning of memory, Hopkins’s novel conducts a creative engagement with emergent theories of psychology, working to develop a framework for addressing both the psychology of racism and the psychic effects it produces. Foregrounding the revivification of the (living) dead as a means of addressing the physiological, psychic, and cultural wounding that marked African and An-

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glo American subjectivity at the turn of the century, Of One Blood’s bicontinental, transhistorical narrative performs an act of critical memory that both reframes the notion of melancholia and resituates the possibilities for African American community. PERPETUATING HISTORY

Hopkins’s literary and journalistic career involved her in the ongoing debate over the means of black progress at the turn of the century. From 1900 to 1904, she served as editor and writer for the Colored American Magazine, the first major African American periodical.4 The Colored American Magazine’s first issue, which appeared in May 1900, described its objective as “the perpetuation of a history of the negro race,”5 indicating an understanding of history as a continual creation rather than a static fact. The editors of the monthly were committed to bringing the work of African Americans into the light of full publicity: “We have Theologians, Artists, Scientists, but for a lack of natural outlet their teachings and their writings have to a certain degree grown dormant.”6 Representing the cultural labor of African Americans as buried alive, deprived of an “outlet,” the editors saw their readers as participants in the task of helping to unearth it and invited them to contribute in whatever capacity they could to the growth of the magazine. Readers were invited to submit their own material, to act as sales agents for the magazine, and to join the cooperative publishing company that produced it. This vision of readerly participation in the ongoing labor of reviving black history placed the Colored American at the center of the black print public sphere at the turn of the century.7 The editorial board of the journal believed that the acquisition and maintenance of citizenship rights would be grounded in the elaboration of a dynamic critical culture: “. . . above all it [the Colored American Magazine] aspires to develop and intensify the bonds of that racial brotherhood, which alone can enable a people, to assert their racial rights as men, and demand their privileges as citizens.”8 This work was rendered especially pressing by the magazine’s moment of emergence. In the decades following Reconstruction, as white American identity was thrown into crisis by the emergence of a generation of African Americans with no personal experience of slavery, the drive to maintain racial inequality took a particularly violent turn, enforcing segregationist ideology with lynchings and terror. Black leaders were divided over the best way to reverse the erosion of African American rights. The vision of progress embraced by the Colored American cooperative stood in opposition to the more conservative program put forward by the leading African American spokesperson of the late nineteenth century, Booker T. Washington. Such an emphasis on self-assertion through cultural and political work bypassed, in

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Washington’s view, the basic material needs of African Americans: “We want no mere mental gymnastics. Our knowledge must be harnessed to the things of real life.”9 Washington’s pragmatic insistence on these “things of real life”—that is, on industrial and agrarian training and the day-to-day needs of the face-to-face community—kept him wary of activists such as those who formed the Colored American cooperative; their focus, he feared, privileged chimeric speculation over bread-and-butter advancement. For Washington, the “bonds of racial brotherhood” would grow “up through the soil,” built by a steady and patient accumulation of wealth in black communities, and not “the pushing of mere abstract knowledge into the head.”10 Washington’s dismissal of the productivity of “mere” reading echoes a concern that has plagued theorists of American democracy since the nineteenth century: that the passive consumption that constitutes participation in the print public sphere can appear a poor substitute for active participation in the face-to-face democratic community.11 His deployment of organic metaphors for social development sets the Washingtonian model of a living, vital, and industrious black community against the necrophilic perversity of those embracing dead letters. Washington’s opponents among the African American leadership, however, reversed these metaphors, charging that it was, in fact, his program that lacked vitality.12 The Colored American cooperative, inspired by W. E. B. Du Bois, was also critical of Washington’s leadership.13 Like Du Bois, they situated the African American struggle in an international frame and endorsed the model of print publicity as best suited to developing diasporic consciousness.14 The Colored American saw the black media as encouraging the active production of community, not the “passive” consumption of “abstract knowledge”; its ideal reader would also be a writer, a seller, an editor, and even a publisher, participating in the creation of African American wealth through the shared reclamation of a hidden past: “A vast and almost unexplored treasury of biography, history, adventure, tradition, folk lore, poetry and song, the accumulation of centuries of such experiences as have never befallen any other people, lies open to us and to you.”15 This rendition of African American community as an exploration narrative parallels Hopkins’s attraction to the adventure plot and her preference for stories devoted to uncovering “hidden” pasts, histories, and civilizations. Her “unrealistic” tales, in the breadth and depth of their imaginings, and in their multigeneric, intertextual, and palimpsistic nature, exemplify what Houston Baker has called the critical function of the black public sphere. As Arjun Appadurai puts it: The image, the imagined, the imaginary—these are all terms which direct us to something critical and new in global cultural processes: the imagination as

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a social practice. No longer mere cultural fantasy (opium for the masses whose real work is elsewhere), no longer simple escape (from a world defined principally by more concrete purposes and structures), no longer elite pastime (thus not relevant to the lives of ordinary people) and no longer mere contemplation (irrelevant for new forms of desire and subjectivity), the imagination has become an organized field of social practices, a form of work . . . and a form of negotiation between sites of agency (“individuals”) and globally defined fields of possibility. . . . The imagination is central to all forms of agency, is itself a social fact, and is the key component of the new social order.16

Though the work of nineteenth-century intellectuals such as Hopkins on precisely this project belies Appadurai’s assertion that the deployment of imagination as critical social practice is in any sense “new,” his understanding of the mediation performed by the imagination in constructing fields of practice enables a more nuanced investigation of both dominant and emergent forms of national and postnational consciousness. Baker distills the relevance of this observation for the historical study of black publicity, adding: “Certainly, the white American imaginary’s view of public with respect to blackness has made abundantly necessary an agential, black imaginative work of the kind suggested by Appurdai. A different, sometimes invisible, black cultural work can be conceived as ceaselessly inventing its own modernity.”17 This notion of ceaseless cultural self-invention recalls the dedication of the Colored American cooperative to “perpetuating” history, a self-consciously critical intervention in which the construction of black modernity becomes the present-tense manifestation of a larger historical work-in-progress. Seen in the light of the Colored American’s modernizing mission, Hopkins’s melodramatic novels take on a different aspect: not just extravagantly decorative fantasies (“simple escape”) designed to widen the circulation of the magazine so that “real news” could effectively be brought to its African American readership, they were, rather, ways of inventing a stylized and historically informed blackness with which to move into the twentieth century. Hopkins sought to elaborate an aesthetic form for black critical publicity,18 responding to the dominant cultural imaginary by ceaselessly contesting its images of blackness and femininity.19 Though Hopkins did not always entirely avoid reifying these images, she succeeded in widening the arena in which an inventive and critical African American publicity could deploy its own counterimaginings. MELODR AMA AND MELANCHOLIA

This expansive revision was nowhere more effectively accomplished than in her final novel, Of One Blood, the only one of her novels to take the

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question of black community outside American borders. Of One Blood’s fantastic and convoluted plot itself defies summary. This resistance to simplification is, of course, a generic convention of sensational melodrama, a mode that Hopkins had employed before; yet Of One Blood goes well beyond her previous novels in moving from the merely improbable to the paranormal. It is, in a sense, a palimpsistic text, writing history upon romance, psychology upon spiritualism, politics upon song. Overlaid with a plenitude of cultural forms whose strategic deployment is not always readily apparent to the untrained eye, Of One Blood distills the polyvalent, often coded, imaginings that are, as Lawrence W. Levine has argued in Black Culture and Black Consciousness, characteristic of nineteenth-century African American thought.20 The force of its longings and the contradictions within which the central characters find themselves are, however, never entirely resolved in the novel, and hence the narrative itself participates in a kind of melancholic deferral of closure. Of One Blood opens in the tiny apartment occupied by Reuel Briggs, a Harvard medical student, as he muses to himself after reading an essay by one M. Binet on paranormal phenomena.21 While Briggs is occupied with his thoughts, a female face appears to him in a vision. Soon afterward, his friend and fellow student Aubrey Livingston appears to take him to a concert of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, an African American gospel troupe on tour to raise money for the university. Both Reuel and Aubrey are struck by the tragically beautiful voice of the troupe’s soprano, Dianthe Lusk, whose face exactly matches the vision that appeared to Reuel earlier in the day. Several weeks later, Reuel, Aubrey, and some friends are occupied in telling ghost stories on Halloween. Aubrey’s fiancée, Molly Vance, tells the gathering of the ghost who haunts the house next door. The men of the party take turns going next door to see the ghost, and when it is Reuel’s turn, he instead sees a vision of Dianthe Lusk. The next day, Reuel is called to the hospital to assist in the care of a train crash victim. The victim is, of course, Dianthe, who appears to be dead, though she has no visible injuries. Reuel administers a potion that he claims will restore “volatile magnetism” to her system. It succeeds, and Dianthe is restored to life; however, her memory is gone, and for the next several months she is subject to falling into trances. Aubrey Livingston investigates her past and discovers that she had been employed by a female hypnotist, whose trance-tricks have weakened her mind. He conceals this information from Reuel, while the two of them make a pact not to reveal her identity to the others. Reuel announces to Aubrey his intention to marry Dianthe, adding that since she has no memory of her past, he will tell her that she is white and there will thus be no racial bar to their marriage. Renamed Felice Adams, Dianthe is admitted to Reuel and Aubrey’s social circle, and Molly Vance takes her into her own home while she recovers.

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Soon afterward, when Reuel graduates from medical school, he finds he cannot get a job. Driven by financial necessity, he accepts a position with an archaeological expedition to the city of Meroe in Ethiopia. Before leaving, he marries Dianthe but does not consummate the marriage. Dianthe (as Felice) remains in the United States under the care of Aubrey and Molly, while Molly’s brother Charlie accompanies Reuel on the expedition. As Reuel nears the pyramids, the ghost of a black woman appears to him and warns him that his servant, Jim Titus, will betray him. After hypnotizing himself, Reuel dreams he hears Dianthe’s voice imploring him for help. Shaken, he resolves to return to the States at the next port of call if there is no letter waiting for him from Dianthe. Upon arriving at Meroe, Reuel receives news that Dianthe, Molly, and Aubrey have all drowned in a boating accident, and he falls into a deep depression. Meanwhile, the archaeologists explore the area, trying in vain to find the entrance to the rumored crypt that holds the secrets of a longlost Ethiopian city. Just as they are about to give up and return to the States, Reuel wanders into a pyramid alone one night, planning to kill himself. Instead, he falls unconscious and wakes up in the secret city, Telassar, surrounded by Ethiopian royalty, who claim he is their long-lost king, Ergamenes. It is at this point that Reuel’s African heritage, hinted at throughout the novel but never overtly discussed, is finally verified; his direct descent from the Ethiopian kings is proven by the dark lotus-lily birthmark that he bears on his chest. Reuel is educated in the ancient traditions and betrothed to Candace, a bronze-skinned virgin queen who bears an uncanny resemblance in feature to Dianthe. Meanwhile his fellow archaeologists continue to search for him. One night Charlie Vance and Jim Titus stumble upon the secret entrance to the city and are held prisoner by the residents of Telassar. Jim dies of a snakebite received while the two are trying to escape but lives long enough to confess to Reuel that he has been working for Aubrey Livingston in a plot to murder Reuel and seduce Dianthe, who is not really dead. Reuel and Charlie, accompanied by Ai, Reuel’s Telassarian mentor, travel back to the States in search of Dianthe. The narrative then moves backward in time, returning to the United States shortly after Reuel’s departure. Played upon by Aubrey, who, it turns out, also possesses a strong mesmeric ability, Dianthe/Felice is troubled by the return of her memory. Aubrey convinces her that Reuel does not know she is black and would divorce her if he did; he demands that she become his lover as the price of his silence. When she hesitates, he arranges the boating trip to drown Molly, and he and Dianthe secretly return to his ancestral estate in Virginia. There, Dianthe lives as his mistress, plagued by guilt, until she meets the black servant Aunt Hannah, who recognizes her

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and tells her the family history that she has never known. Hannah’s story reveals that Dianthe is Reuel’s sister; both of them were born to the slave woman Mira, who had appeared to Dianthe in a vision one night. Mira, as it turns out, was kept as a mistress by Aubrey’s father; after he sold her, she was able to keep Reuel but lost track of Dianthe, who was raised in an orphanage. Hannah then confesses that after the elder Livingston’s son by his legal (white) wife died in infancy, she herself secretly substituted another mulatto child borne by Mira, so that Aubrey is Dianthe and Reuel’s full brother as well. Dianthe is driven nearly mad by the knowledge of Aubrey’s duplicity and of her unwittingly incestuous relations with her two brothers. She secures a vial of poison and attempts to trick Aubrey into drinking it, but he finds out and forces her to swallow it instead. The poison is slow acting, so she lingers in agony for several days, permitting her to die in Reuel’s arms when he finally reaches her side. Hannah then relates the family’s story to him. Reuel takes Aubrey to court for murder, but the Livingston wealth wins him a pardon, whereupon Ai, Reuel’s Ethiopian foster father, mesmerizes Aubrey and whispers a secret command into his ear. Aubrey promptly drowns himself, and Reuel and Ai, accompanied by Hannah, return to Telassar. Reuel marries Candace and converts the city’s residents to Christianity, setting the conditions for its emergence into the modern world. But the novel does not offer an uncomplicated “happy ending.” Reuel’s experience, we learn, makes for some continuing bouts of melancholy, and he also remains anxiously wary of the “advance of mighty nations penetrating the dark, mysterious forests of his native land. ‘Where will it stop?’ he sadly questions. ‘What will the end be?’ But none save Omnipotence can solve the problem.”22 If the plot of Of One Blood, summarized thus, feels overwhelming, the experience of reading the novel is even more so. Interrupted by intertexts—poems, spirituals, history lessons, and fragments of an essay by William James—and marked by secrets and epistemological gaps—the open secret of Reuel’s racial origin, the unknown secret that the two (unknown) brothers share (for Aubrey, it turns out, has known all along that Reuel is black but not that he is himself), the identity of the ghost who appears to Dianthe and Reuel (for he identifies her as his mother only at Jim Titus’s deathbed), and most important, the unreadable writing on a set of scrolls that Reuel is given in Telassar, which, he is told, contain all there is to know about the Ethiopian tradition—the novel mocks the very possibility of narrative reconciliation and closure. Insofar as the story solves one problem (the difficulty of constructing a viable black community in the American context), it posits another (the threat of modern imperialism to PanAfrican cultures) at its end, an act wholly typical of the clinical definition of melancholia. As Hubertus Tellerbach has put it, “To the existence of the

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melancholic . . . is assigned the mission to oppose the powers of darkness and one’s own faintness of heart—whereby every moment of measuring up to the task leaves only a greater awareness of what is still to come. . . .”23 The melodramatic plot of Of One Blood can itself be seen as a melancholic narrative form, insofar as melodrama marks a longing for the lost object of the conventional liberal-sentimental fantasy, in which the home, built around a solid gender order, marks the stable ground of reproduction of a benevolent and nurturing sociality.24 As Julia Stern has recently argued with respect to Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig, slavery and racism were seen to distort the mother-child bond, valorized in sentimentality, to such an extent that it was likely to lapse into Gothic meaninglessness.25 Mira’s inability to keep her children safe from harm and her haunting insistence on trying even after her death graphically underscore this point. Hopkins’s melodrama pits the ruthless conventions of the Gothic, in which the putative safety of the home is everywhere undermined, against the sentimental longing for domestic inviolability; its own hypostatized mourning for this lost possibility stands as its social critique. The utopian promise of Telassar appears, in this light, not as a permanent “safe space” of retreat, but as a “perpetuated” ideal, a horizon of possibility that must be continually recreated. RESIGNIFYING MELANCHOLIA

Melancholia itself has traditionally been viewed as a sort of addiction to mourning, or mourning as a way of life.26 But this habitual mourning need not result from the loss of any particular object; in fact, from the classical era through the nineteenth century, the primary cause of melancholia was believed to be not external loss but physiological predisposition. The disposing factor for melancholia was, in the humoral theory of the body, a constitutional excess of “black bile,” which made the body cool and morose. Even as the humoral model fell out of favor in eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury medicine, and as the medical conception of melancholia became more thoroughly psychologized, its theorists continued to assert that a “hereditary predisposition” was the most significant risk factor for the condition, with loss or disappointment in the external world coming only second.27 And while Freud, following the work of Karl Abraham, retheorized melancholia in 1916 as entirely concerned with a disordered reaction to object loss, placing it squarely within the domain of psychoanalysis, he nevertheless insisted that his remarks covered only a small number of cases and that many, if not most, cases of melancholia were somatic, not psychological, in origin.28 Consistent with the association between melancholia and certain types of bodies has been the belief that melancholics tend to be more perceptive

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and insightful than others—to possess, by virtue of their condition, a privileged access to knowledge. Aristotle insisted that melancholia characterized prophets, sibyls, and soothsayers; Freud, writing in the twentieth century, saw the gift of the melancholic as not prophecy but selfunderstanding, an unusually perceptive and tragically accurate critical insight: “. . . [the melancholic] has a keener eye for the truth than others who are not melancholic . . . [and] for all we know it may be that he has come pretty near to self-knowledge; we only wonder why a man must become ill before he can discover truth of this kind.”29 Melancholia’s purported truth-telling critical capacity may also allow it to shadow the dominant ideology of a given historical era. As Juliana Schiesari speculates regarding the mournfulness of (post)modernity: “Perhaps the melancholic sense of ineffable loss in conceptual, affective and historical terms is only the flip side of the modernist espousal of progress, its objective or even chronological correlative: the self-critical tedium that comes after the euphoria of modernism. . . .”30 However, the very move that allows psychoanalysis to valorize melancholia—to construct it as, in her terms, a “habitus of cultural empowerment”31—has, as Schiesari argues in The Gendering of Melancholia, entailed a simultaneous naturalizing of melancholia in women, so that their tendency toward the same syndrome is seen not as creative and agential but as depressive and static. Women’s loss, the loss that is “woman,” is delegitimated in comparison to men’s melancholic display of loss; as themselves the sign of loss, or lack, women can have no agential relationship to it.32 Yet as a reading of pre-Freudian tracts on melancholia reveals, sexual difference is not the only kind of signifying difference that embodies the loss of the melancholic. Insofar as melancholia has itself been understood to emerge from a certain type of embodiment—one that is insistently if subtly racialized through its association with “black bile” and “darkcomplected persons”—its clinical history gestures consistently toward not only the differentiation but also the pathologization of race. Melancholics, moreover, were consistently conceived as “earthy” and hyperembodied, prone to emotional and sexual excess, and tending, in their attacks, toward a kind of bestial regression—characteristics that both echo and extend European figures of the colonial and/or cultural other. My point here is not, however, that racial difference constitutes the “true” ground of melancholia but that racial difference is another kind of alterity marking the presumably absolute division—that between life and death—on which melancholia, the illness of mourning, plays. Of course, in psychoanalysis, sexual difference has come to stand as the mark of alterity tout court, as the dividing line between self and other—a habit of analysis that was, as Mikkel BorchJacobsen has recently argued, Freud’s way of making a difference between his own work and that of other psychologists.33 Hence, while Schiesari and

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other feminist theorists, such as Elisabeth Bronfen, have recently interrogated the part that death plays in the construction of psychoanalytic alterity and the way that women both stand in for, and provide the male subject with a defense against, death,34 these theorists have not yet devoted enough attention to examining the way that racial difference signifies alongside gender in early psychological and psychoanalytic texts. This oversight is, however, less a case of willful neglect than a result of the poverty of language offered by psychoanalysis for addressing issues of race and culture. Race, like other forms of alterity, must, in the Freudian analytic, always be mapped back onto gender, since a specific language for addressing the psychic impact of racial difference is lacking.35 Despite the failure to elaborate such a language, however, psychoanalysis is by no means entirely silent on questions of race. Indeed, the recurrence of racial and evolutionary metaphors in Freud’s work operates, according to several recent theorists, symptomatically, signifying the operation of an incomplete repression. Some critics have gone so far as to suggest that race is not simply repressed in psychoanalysis but is, in fact, the repressed of psychoanalysis.36 Yet while such arguments offer a useful corrective to the silence of psychoanalysis on the mechanics of racial identification, the desire to make racial difference into the singular truth of psychoanalysis and gender into a metaphor for that truth simply reverses the Freudian tendency to map race onto gender, without accounting for why these two categories should have been brought into relation in this way. While the unmistakable echoes of historical signifiers and stereotypes of race in psychoanalytic writing about gender lend weight to these arguments, it appears less that gender has been substituted for race than that the permeability of discourses of race and gender resulted in a marked interpenetration of the two in nineteenth-century pathology; if gender can be seen as “standing in for” race, race can also be seen to stand in for gender. And if this tautology is especially marked in psychoanalytic theories on melancholia, as I will shortly demonstrate, this is less because either racial or sexual difference constitutes the “real” ground of the melancholic loss than because both were, in the nineteenth-century cultural imaginary, easily deployable to signify the absolute metaphorics of loss upon which melancholia’s account of the (necessarily) incomplete formation of the subject draws—the metaphorics, that is, of death. Along these lines, it appears that the relationship of psychoanalysis to questions of race and culture is itself melancholic. In “Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation” (1972), Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok detail the process of setting up a psychic crypt, or tomb, for the lost object that allows the subject to preserve it in secret while behaving as if unconscious of the loss.37 The surface impoverishment of language about an Other, combined with certain coded clues, signifies the existence

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of this psychic crypt, which is melancholia’s primary means of repression. We might, then, speculate that psychoanalysis, which superficially underestimates the centrality of questions of cultural and racial identification in the process of psychic formation, in fact “encrypts” race within it, unwilling either fully to introject or wholly to abandon it. A similar charge might even be leveled against Abraham and Torok’s work on the subject; the resonances between their metaphorics of melancholia and Pauline Hopkins’s last novel are so striking that anyone familiar with the former might be tempted to read the latter as a hyperbolic literalization of psychoanalytic theories of melancholia, all the more unheimlich for its having predated those theories by nearly seven decades. But my point is precisely that the theory of melancholia itself, in its preoccupation with death and burial, plays upon the very figures of “primitive” cultural alterity that Hopkins employed in her novel. Although the language of melancholia centers around images of death, the death of any particular other is not, as I have already noted, required for the initiation of a melancholic attack. As Freud observes in “Mourning and Melancholia,” mourning may just as easily be triggered by the loss of hope or of one’s faith in “fatherland, liberty, an ideal, and so forth.”38 And while in nonpathological mourning, the ego gradually effects a separation from the lost object or ideal, convincing itself that although the object is dead, it may itself continue to live, a certain ambivalence toward the lost ideal complicates this process for the melancholic; moreover, the melancholic experiences the sense of loss not in the outside world but in herself. What the melancholic cannot stop mourning is, in a sense, herself: the incompleteness of self (exposed, in death, by the inability to live forever) that the loss of the beloved ideal exemplifies.39 An essay by the psychologist William James, published a few months before Hopkins began to serialize Of One Blood,40 outlines this sense of loss through a disguised account of a melancholic attack suffered by the author himself.41 The attack begins when the author-narrator recalls a catatonic patient he has encountered in a mental institution; he is horrified by the implicit mirroring of himself in the other and falls into a deep depression: Whilst in the midst of philosophic pessimism and general depression of spirits about my prospects, I went one evening into a dressing room in the twilight to procure some article that was there; when suddenly there fell upon me without any warning, just as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence. Simultaneously there arose in my mind the image of an epileptic patient whom I had seen in the asylum, a black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic, who used to sit all day on one of the benches, or rather shelves, against the wall, with his knees drawn up against his chin and the coarse grey undershirt, which was his only garment, drawn over them inclosing his entire figure. He sat there like a sort of sculptured Egyptian cat

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or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and looking absolutely non-human. This image and my fear entered into a species of combination with each other. That shape am I, I felt, potentially. Nothing that I possess can defend me against that fate, if the hour for it should strike for me as it struck for him. There was such a horror of him, and such a perception of my own merely momentary discrepancy from him, that it was as if something hitherto solid within my breast gave way, and I became a mass of quivering fear. After this the universe was changed for me altogether. I awoke morning after morning with a horrible dread at the pit of my stomach, and with a sense of the insecurity of life that I never knew before, and that I have never felt since. It was like a revelation; and although the immediate feelings passed away, the experience has made me sympathetic with the morbid feelings of others ever since. It gradually faded, but for months I was unable to go out into the dark alone.42

James’s account of his own depression and hopelessness arises, as he makes clear, from a sense that there is no way to defend the self against its inevitable obliteration by what appears here as a living death (“That shape am I, I felt . . .”) but is clarified, later in the essay, as the fear of death itself— death as absolute negation, as nonexistence. Coming at him out of the darkness as he seeks an unspecified object, this existential horror is embodied in the figure of the patient, who, although given no clear racial identity in the text (he has black hair and eyes, but greenish skin—that is, the dark features and “sallow” complexion of the classic melancholic), is nevertheless compared to figures of “primitive” cultural difference (“an Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy”), figures that themselves are associated with forms of living death.43 This figure of the other is entirely static in the scenario, moving nothing but his eyes (which look about but do not rest on James), and yet James’s experience of this alterity is an active one; the other’s nonhuman passivity contrasts strikingly with his own metaphorical deliquescence. The inactive youth may figure death, but it is James himself who undergoes the decay of melancholia in meeting up with the imago. James maps this active/passive matrix onto an imaginary heterosexual encounter (“this image and my fear entered into a species of combination with one another”) that gives birth to a revelatory dread: life, even my own, is insupportably transient. This fantasized miscegenation between the narrator and the figure of the deathly Other induces and best exemplifies the melancholic trauma in his essay. For James, however, the loss eventually becomes gain; his immediate horror at his own incompleteness fades in a few months, as he converts this threatening “openness” into a benevolent and insightful “sympathy.” James and Freud both lamented the absence, in the modern world, of such enlightening encounters with fear. As James observed, primitive man differed from modern man in that the former was continually presented

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with occasions for fear and thus constantly aware of the possibility of his own death; Freud, in an essay called “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” echoed this sentiment, noting that the relative erasure of death from modern life tended to bring with it a certain emotional shallowness.44 The metonymic primitive proximity to death translated into the metaphoric substitution of the primitive as a sign of death. For both theorists, primitive man also differed from modern man in lacking self-consciousness and the sense of agency that accompanies it. Along these lines, it is telling that the increased sympathy and insight that the healer-figure James gains from his encounter with the idiotic patient in “The Sick Soul” does not seem to affect the patient himself in any way; though James does not specify what happens to the youth, we may safely assume that he remains catatonic. That is to say, the privileged insight that the melancholic has traditionally been accorded as a result of her psychic proximity to loss does not translate into any sort of gain for the other who figures as the imago of that loss. The other signifies, but cannot read his or her own significations properly (which is to say, profitably). What feminist critics have seen as a “naturalization” of loss in women in theories of melancholia operates, as well, along lines of cultural and racial difference: the primitives stay primitive while the moderns become more self-aware by observing them. Kenneth Warren’s Black and White Strangers makes an analogous point with respect to American realist writing of the late nineteenth century. Warren argues that while Anglo-American realist writers tended to mobilize blackness to signify “the real” of progressive politics—that is, the materiality of black oppression operated to signal the failure of the democratic ideal— they were dubious about the ability of African American writers to shed the same light on the subject.45 As William Dean Howells’s ambivalent relation to the “bitter, bitter” work of the progressive African American realist Charles Waddell Chesnutt makes clear, Anglo-American writers believed that a certain objectivity was required to translate effectively the experience of loss into artistic insight and that black writers were too deeply inscribed with absence or loss to be able to transcend their subjective proximity to this loss sufficiently.46 In other words, when the assertion of a posited political “truth” through writing shaded into self-assertion, things could get a little messy. It is precisely this site of confusion—this complex nexus of political, cultural, and psychic (re)construction—that Hopkins and the other members of the Colored American cooperative dedicated themselves to exploring. Insofar as they embraced the Du Boisian ideal of “ultimate assimilation through self-assertion, and on no other terms,”47 they worked to lay the groundwork for the construction of a vital and viable African American selfhood—one that would not leave the “primitive” other for dead, as Anglo progressive writers tended to do, but would break open and revitalize the

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crypts of African culture in the service of black community-building and critical publicity. As I have noted above, Hopkins believed that addressing the psychosocial development, or, in her words, the “inmost thoughts and feelings,” of African Americans was a politically necessary project. By engaging with psychological theory in Of One Blood and by intertwining this theory with her accounts of a “lost” African dynasty, she sought to expose the psychic impact of American constructions of race on African American subject formation. That is to say, Hopkins’s disguised adaptation of the work of William James and her narrative and characterological investigations into melancholia do not simply reflect the ingenious transposition of psychological terminology to political reality, as Cynthia Schrager has argued.48 Rather, her novel may itself be read as an intervention into psychology, insofar as the discipline failed to grapple seriously with questions of racial difference and black identification. Psychology was not a metaphor for “the real” of politics in Hopkins’s work; she recognized that black psychology was itself a (political) reality, a material fact bound up with the specific conditions of the historical moment. Moreover, as the late-nineteenth-century obsession with the boundaries of racial identification and, for whites, with the means of differentiating “civilized” whiteness from “primitive” blackness demonstrates, white psychology, as much as more “concrete” social factors, shaped the topography of racism at the turn of the century.49 Accordingly, the adventure plot of Hopkins’s last novel performs an exploration of the psychic “inner space” of African Americans, mapping and attempting to create the conditions for resistance to the psychological infolding of black “social death.” PHANTOMATIC TR ANSMISSIONS AND MELANCHOLIC INHERITANCES

Of One Blood corresponds to the generic conventions of melodrama by organizing its narrative through the deployment of particular, readily visible character types; the manipulation of these types accounts for the narrative flow as much as the events of plot do.50 In terms of melancholia, the latenineteenth-century character “type” that most readily presents itself in Hopkins’s work is that of the tragic mulatto/mulatta. The trope of mulattismas-tragedy did not, of course, originate with Hopkins. Abolitionist literature had firmly established this figure in an attempt to make the tragedy of slavery visible to white readers, who, it was assumed, would more readily identify with the plight of light-skinned slaves than dark-skinned ones. In the postbellum period, the regenerated tragic mulatto/mulatta was mobilized in a number of ways: as a sentimental critique of the injustices the world placed on black women, as a figure through which to explore the emerging discourses of biological determinism, and as an explicit argu-

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ment against miscegenation.51 African American writers in the nineteenth century had a complex relation to this figure; they often sought to deploy it, particularly in antebellum fiction (nearly all of the extant antebellum African American novels center around a mulatta protagonist beset by trauma and prejudice), as both a critique of the racism that enforced the “tragic” mandate on these figures and, more subtly, of the racism that inhabited even reform-minded white writers’ use of the trope.52 It would be an interpretive mistake to hold that the figure of the tragic mulatta/mulatto must always connote melancholia per se, since the valence of the trope, as I have suggested above, changes according to the critical orientation of the work in which it appears. However, in Hopkins’s writing, and particularly in Of One Blood, the equation is irresistible. Her tragic mulattas/mulattos, whether or not they triumph at the novel’s end, are unmistakably melancholic; in fact, the African descent of Reuel Briggs, though not revealed until he lands in Telassar, is initially implied directly in relation to the condition. Upon his first appearance in the plot, Reuel’s skin is described as “white, but of a tint suggesting olive, an almost sallow color which is a mark of strong, melancholic temperaments” (444). Since this description comes when Reuel is sitting in his apartment contemplating suicide, the reader is tempted to take it at face value, so to speak; yet it also implicitly signifies, to an African American readership well-versed in such signs, that Reuel is black. This suggestion constitutes an additional, more than an alternative, account of the meaning of Reuel’s complexion, however, since the possibility of making a clear-cut distinction between melancholy as such and blackness as such in the novel’s description is undercut by its continual, if subtle, linkage of the two. Later in the evening, when Aubrey asks, “Come to think of it, Reuel, what do you think of the Negro problem?” Reuel replies, “I have a horror of discussing the woes of unfortunates, tramps, stray dogs and cats and Negroes—probably because I am an unfortunate myself” (449). Here, again, the suggestive juxtaposition of terms implies to the attentive reader that Reuel is African American; and yet, as he is without family, friends, finances, or future, “unfortunate” stands as an accurate objective description of Reuel regardless of race. The melancholic “cover story” that both masks and reveals Reuel’s racial identity is taken in a different direction in the character of Dianthe Lusk, who is capable not only of physically signifying melancholia but also of affectively transmitting it. While Reuel’s friends mock and defend themselves against his moodiness, Dianthe’s can never quite be contained, since it is her vocation, as a singer, to make sure it proliferates: “Go down, Moses, way down in Egypt’s land, Tell ol’ Pharoah, let my people go,” sang the woman in tones that awakened ringing harmonies in the heart of every listener. . . . Some of the women in the audience wept; there was the distinct echo of

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a sob in the deathly quiet which gave tribute to the power of genius. Spellbound they sat beneath the outpoured anguish of a suffering soul. All the horror, the degradation from which a race had been delivered were in the pleading strains of the woman’s voice. It strained the senses almost beyond endurance. It pictured to that self-possessed, highly-cultured New England assemblage as nothing else ever had, the awfulness of the hell from which a people had been happily plucked. (453–54)

Dianthe’s “celestial” voice operates here and elsewhere in the novel to mesmerize her listeners. Struck dumb and motionless before her magical transmission of experience, they can only respond with bodily signs of sadness— sighs and sobs and tears. They become suspended in a hypnotic state, so engulfed by feeling that their own physical presence is rendered nearly ghostly; what marks the continued existence of life in the “deathly quiet” that Dianthe has produced is not even a sob itself but the echo of one, its aural ghost. The audience involuntarily mirrors the anguish that Dianthe’s own knowledge of the “hell” of slavery conveys; for although she herself has been “plucked” from slavery while a child, its formative memory lives on inside her.53 Her trademark song, moreover, not only reworks the recent historical experience of slavery but also suggests, in its lyrics, both the physical terrain and the deep historical play of the latter part of the novel. The song’s mining of the occluded historical does not stop at this level; its appearance in the novel is itself an excavation of sorts, since the singing of this spiritual was frequently prohibited on Southern plantations because of its obvious critique of slavery. Dianthe’s appearance in the narrative implies that the melancholia of the mulatto figure derives from its social positioning rather than from the physiological composition upon which the first description of Reuel plays. The sadness she transmits clearly emerges from her artistic proximity, as a black Gospel singer, to loss, and not from “temperament” alone. Yet to say that this melancholia is socially, rather than constitutionally, derived does not mean that it is superficial; rather, it marks the psyches of these two characters through and through. It is literalized in the figure of the slowacting poison, administered by a “white” man, which eventually kills Dianthe, and in the “shadows of great sins,” which “darken Reuel’s life” even after he has taken up residence in Telassar (621). It is important to note here, however, that Hopkins is not blindly following in the footsteps of white abolitionist writers by seeking to make her heroes, as mulattoes, more palatable to a white audience, nor is she implying that only African Americans of mixed descent display this range of feeling. Rather, as Claudia Tate points out, for Hopkins, the term mulatto signified the racial and cultural makeup of all African Americans, regardless of skin color; Hopkins argued that no African American was of unmixed descent.54 Yet while some critics have read this as Hopkins’s acknow-

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ledgment of Anglo-American superiority and her wish for assimilation into what she viewed as the superior culture, her recognition of the racial mixture of African Americans actually insists upon highlighting the brutality of the slaveholder by exposing the sexual exploitation of African American women in slavery; the melancholia of the mulatto is, in part, a mourning for the loss of sexual autonomy. Hence her deployment of the type of the tragic mulatto/mulatta mobilizes both an exploration of the cultural and psychic situation of African Americans at the turn of the century and a critical reminder of injustices past and present. Hopkins continues a tradition established in the earliest extant African American novel, William Wells Brown’s Clotel, which follows the fate of women slaves patrilineally descended from Thomas Jefferson;55 the tragedy of her mulattas is not an individual, but a national, one. The implicit reference to forced miscegenation carried in Hopkins’s figure of the melancholic mulatto finds its echo, in the novel, in the figure of the ghost who appears, on different continents, to both Reuel and Dianthe and who is later revealed, by Aunt Hannah, to be their mother. This maternal phantom, whose identity is deferred but whose function as a figure of both loss and protection is clear, carries with her the weight of the melancholic epistemology of the novel: the inability to situate oneself properly in relation to the past when present circumstances conspire to make this impossible. The deployment of the mother-figure, charged with the reproduction of persons as well as the birthing of nations, connects the various levels—individual, cultural, and national—across which this epistemology resonates. Mira’s appearance in the novel is foretold by Aubrey Livingston, who uses her story to confirm the reality of mesmeric phenomena. Aubrey relates, to the party assembled at the Vances’ on Christmas Eve, the experiments performed by his father in the realm of mesmerism, particularly upon a slave whom Aubrey identifies as his mother’s waiting-maid. These experiments were the making of the elder Livingston’s fame in medical circles. However, when the slave (Mira) predicted, in front of a party of Southern gentry, the coming of the Civil War and Emancipation, Aubrey’s father became enraged and had her sold. The story told by Aubrey highlights Mira’s use as both an object of scientific research (as the material for Livingston’s case studies) and a thing of amusement: Aubrey’s own recollection of the mesmeric phenomena comes from occasions on which his father hypnotized Mira as a sort of party trick to amuse his dinner guests— but omits her sexual exploitation by his father; or, more exactly, his hypnotic manipulation stands in for sexual exploitation, as his will replaces her own during the act of mesmerism. Yet paradoxically, the very act that forces Mira into deeper submission also frees her. Aubrey reports that once his father has hypnotized her, “. . . from a serious, rather sad Negress, very mild

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with everyone, Mira changed to a gay, noisy, restless woman, full of irony and sharp jesting. In this case this peculiar metamorphosis always occurred. Nothing could be more curious than to see her and hear her” (486–87).56 Mira’s “peculiar metamorphosis” under the mesmeric trance that metonymizes the sexual power relations of the peculiar institution stands in sharp contrast to her everyday submissive sadness; the hypnosis allows her to access another personality, one that is not bound by the constraints of servile decorum. It is, moreover, when she is hypnotized that Mira’s prophetic powers become active, and these powers are not subservient to the elder Livingston’s will. Indeed, her final act of sharp jesting, the one that inspires Livingston to have her sold (“. . . For you, Captain, a prisoner’s cell and a pauper’s grave” [486]), turns out to be no joke at all, as Aubrey reports: “My father died while held as a prisoner of war, in Boston Harbor. . . . There is only too much truth in [the] science of mesmeric phenomena. The world is a wonderful place” (487). Likewise, Mira manages to maintain a measure of power even in Livingston’s sexual exploitation of her. Just as his attempt to appropriate her psychic powers for his own scientific fame and domestic amusement ends in a public prophecy of the fall of the South, she reproduces, as a result of his sexual exploitation, both the heir to the Livingston fortune (Aubrey himself, who is entirely unaware, in telling this story, that he was observing his own mother) and the heir to the throne of Telassar. Although Mira’s hypnotic feats have been recorded by the elder Livingston in books, her noble lineage is recorded in the flesh of her descendants, in a sign legible only to herself and Aunt Hannah: it remains, throughout the novel, invisible and illegible to the whites. As a phantom, Mira’s materializations in the novel are all connected to the issue of legibility—more specifically, to making coded and “hidden” signs visible and comprehensible to the protagonists. The first time that Mira appears as a ghost is to Dianthe, just after her memory has returned and Aubrey has made advances to her. While Dianthe is sitting alone in her room, she sees the figure of an olive-skinned woman, dressed as a servant, rise through the floor. The figure crosses the room, opens a book lying on the table, writes something in it, and then disappears. Dianthe looks at the book, which is the Bible, and observes that the text of Luke 12 has been underscored: “For there is nothing covered that shall not be revealed” (506). Next to the passage, in a “fine female hand,” she sees written the single word Mira. Mira, of course, means “look,” and it reads as an attempt to call Dianthe’s attention to the prophetic text; however, as is later confirmed, it is also the mother’s name. Mira’s next appearance in the novel is to Reuel, the only one of her children who knows her to be his mother. While he is in Africa, she appears to him in his tent and makes it possible for him to see the text of a letter

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that his treacherous servant, Jim Titus, is reading behind his back. The letter, signed “A. L.,” implies both that Jim has been holding back the correspondence between Reuel and Dianthe and that Jim is involved in a plot to murder Reuel. Mira’s appearance again commands a character to “look” for what is hidden and reveals the “covered” alliance between Aubrey and Jim. As a result, Reuel enters a mesmeric trance and discovers the fact of Molly’s death and Aubrey’s perfidy. Mira later returns to Reuel while he is in the city of Telassar and brings him to Jim Titus’s deathbed; Jim had been crushed by serpents when he and Charlie, trying to escape from the hidden city, stumbled across its store of secret treasures. Jim tells Reuel of his pact with Aubrey and also explains the reason for his own participation: “Aubrey Livingston was my foster brother, and I could deny him nothing” (593). The siblinglike relation between the ex-slave Jim and the master’s son, Aubrey, occludes Jim’s will; since Aubrey has inherited both his father’s mesmeric ability and his influential social position, his demands are difficult to resist. At the moment of his death, however, he cedes his place to Reuel, who is Aubrey’s biological brother, and tells him of his fraternal relation to both Dianthe and Aubrey. Yet since Jim does not know that Mira is Aubrey’s mother as well, he mistakenly identifies Reuel as Aubrey’s half brother. Jim advises Reuel to return home at once and try to rescue Dianthe; when Reuel does so, his family history is revealed in toto by his grandmother, Hannah. Mira appears once more to Dianthe, repeating the same scene as before, when she lies in the throes of a depression produced by her liaison with Aubrey and her belief that Reuel is dead. She tells Aubrey of the apparition, and he reads the passage from Luke that Mira has underscored in the Bible, quoting the full verse: “For there is nothing covered that shall not be revealed, nor hid that shall not be known” (598). Soon afterward, while Aubrey is away, Dianthe discovers a store of hidden letters from Reuel. The discovery that Reuel is alive and that Aubrey has been keeping back his letters nearly drives her insane, until she settles on a single object: “Her thoughts took shape in the one word ‘Reuel,’ and by her side stood again the form of the pale, lovely mulatress, her long black curls enveloping her like a veil” (600). Once again, Mira appears to accompany text—the word Reuel—and give it a deeper meaning, although this meaning is still unknown to Dianthe. Two weeks later, she meets an old woman in a “wild and unfamiliar” part of the woods near the house. The old woman takes her to her cabin and croons a funeral chant over her, then reveals herself to be Hannah, her grandmother. She tells Dianthe the story of her mother’s exploitation at the hands of the elder Livingston and confesses, as well, her part in switching the infant Aubrey for Livingston’s wife’s infant child. The vision is then in part explained—Mira stood beside Dianthe as both Reuel’s mother and her own.

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Each time Mira appears, it is to impart to Reuel and Dianthe (and even to Aubrey) knowledge that they lack—not repressed knowledge, but facts and relations of which they are entirely unaware. The knowledge she transmits is not theirs but her own. As Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok define it, the “phantom,” in a psychoanalytic sense, is the trace of an intuited but unknown family secret transmitted across generations: “The phantom is a formation in the dynamic unconscious that is found there not because of the subject’s own repression but on account of a direct empathy with the unconscious or the rejected psychic matter of a parental object. Consequently, the phantom is not at all the product of the subject’s self-creation by means of the interplay between repressions and introjections.”57 The phantom, in fact, marks the limits of self-creation, revealing the imposition of others’ lives—and, specifically, of alienated, unbearable, or unknown aspects of others’ lives—onto that of the subject. Phantomatic return signifies, in Hopkins’s understanding of melancholic subject-formation as much as in Abraham and Torok’s, the inscription of historical trauma upon the subject, which becomes the subject’s conscription into traumatic history. The most obvious knowledge that the maternal phantom Mira transmits to the siblings is that of their own incestuous relations. This is not simply an effect of the disarray into which slavery cast the black family but also a repetition of the symptom of slavery as it has already inscribed itself upon Mira, for, as Hannah implicitly reveals in her own tale, Mira and the elder Livingston were themselves probably brother and sister. Hannah was the mistress of the elder Livingston’s father, and Mira was the only one of her ten children that she was allowed to keep. This probable fraternal relation did not, however, stop the elder Livingston from forcing Mira to become his own mistress. The incestuous situation in which Mira’s children find themselves is but a replication of their mother’s own life, gruesomely literalizing the law that the child, in slavery, follows the condition of the mother. Although Aubrey is never enslaved and Reuel and Dianthe are freed while children, all three find themselves compelled to repeat the primary incestuous pairing. As Hannah insists, “Dese things jes’ got to happen in slavery” (605). The incorporated phantom need not, according to the passage above, derive from an actual parent but may instead originate in an ego-ideal placed in a parental position in relation to the subject. Hence constructions such as the nation are able to initiate phantomatic transmissions. In his review of the idea of the phantom, Nicholas Rand comments, “Abraham and Torok’s work enables us to understand how the falsification, ignorance, or disregard of the past—whether institutionalized by a totalitarian state . . . or practiced by parents and grandparents—is the breeding ground of the phantomatic return of shameful secrets on the level of individuals, families, the community, and possibly the entire nation.”58 The shameful

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secret that this maternal phantom imparts is the primal violence to the family enacted by the peculiar institution, at precisely the historical moment (the decades just prior to the Civil War) when slavery began to depict itself as above all a nationally appropriate, domestic-familial institution.59 The “rejected” or denied psychic material of the patria is, accordingly, absorbed by its latter-day subject-citizens. Hopkins’s narrative adapts perhaps the oldest theme in the American novelistic tradition, incest, which was conventionally employed to warn against the devastating effects of too much social mobility (by freeing individuals from the tyranny of bloodlines, the democratic nation ran the risk of having brothers marry sisters), to expose the trauma caused by too little (by subjecting certain individuals to the tyranny of bloodlines and yet denying them the protection of their own families, the slaveholding nation ran the same risk).60 Yet the transmission of the incest story is only part of the transgenerational inheritance that this phantom marks. Hannah’s story accounts for the linkage of the image of Mira with the name Reuel, both as it designates the central character of the novel, Reuel Briggs, and in its homonymic pronunciation, “royal”: it is through Mira that the royal blood of the lost Ethiopian kings is reproduced, and that lineage is confirmed by the appearance of a visual sign— the lotus-lily on the breast—whose meaning is known, outside Telassar, to only two women, Hannah and Mira. The secret reproduction of this noble lineage within the confines of slavery, as an occluded history that can be traced only through encrypted signs on the body, parallels and reverses the story of forced and incestuous miscegenation that marks the Briggs and Livingston genealogy. Royalty and rape, ancient glory and present misery, become intertwined nearly inextricably in this tale, an ambivalent intermixture that accounts for the presence of melancholic forms of communication throughout the story. First among these forms, of course, is the oral and written transmission of knowledge, accompanied by an excess of affect that points toward its multiple, sometimes hidden, connotations. Just as Mira always appears as a surplus to written text—inscribing her name in the margins of the Bible, facilitating Reuel’s vision of Jim Titus’s letter, accompanying Dianthe’s recollection of the word Reuel—so, too, does an excess of affective signification accompany the singing that marks the recognition of identity in the novel. As Felice/Dianthe, in a mesmeric trance, performs the rendition of “Go Down, Moses” that brings back her memory, her listeners remark the presence of “a weird contralto, veiled as it were, rising and falling on every wave of the great soprano, and reaching the ear as if from some great distance” (502). This vocal apparition—veiled in precisely the way that Dianthe sees her mother veiled by her hair—haunts the entire song, and at its completion, Dianthe falls back “in a dead faint.” Here, the affective excess that stunned her audience at the Fisk Jubilee Singers’ concert in Boston echoes

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back upon Dianthe, forcing her into a compulsory repetition of the song that she, as Felice, has consciously forgotten—mobilizing her testimonial powers without the consent of her conscious will—and then putting her into a deathlike state that brings her identity back to her, in much the same way that it forced the Bostonian audience to recall the repressed memory of slavery. Later, after she meets Hannah in the woods, she gazes at the older woman, thinking of a poem that describes an African princess (which, unknown to her, Hannah is), when “suddenly a low sound, growing gradually louder, fell upon Dianthe’s ear; it was the voice of the old woman crooning a mournful minor cadence, but for an instant it sent a chill around the girl’s heart. It was a funeral chant commonly sung by Negroes over the dead” (604). Hannah’s funeral song, interrupting her memory of the poem, again petrifies Dianthe at precisely the moment when the rest of her familial history is about to be revealed. The stasis produced at the moment of recognition of identity brings back the novel’s fixation with melancholia as a form of living death. This stasis can itself be seen as a kind of melancholia—as an excess of affect that has lost its object. Dianthe’s ability to knock her audiences dead reproduces and extends the sense of loss experienced by the novel’s African American characters as a result of the familial, cultural, and political severing enacted by slavery. Yet emancipation alone proves insufficient to remove this wound, particularly in light of the continued political and economic disenfranchisement of African Americans that followed Reconstruction. In its African section, Hopkins’s narrative reaches beyond the trope of familial reconstruction toward a larger cultural regeneration, positing the reclamation of a utopian Ethiopian society as the telos of the work of mourning the ongoing African American trauma. “Entombment” is, as Abraham and Torok have observed, an apt metaphor for the specific dynamics of repression in melancholia; the subject, unable to deal with a loss, instead imports the objectal correlative of that loss into a “psychic crypt” and seals it off from her own conscious knowledge—she buries the imago alive in her own mind in order to repress the knowledge of its “death.” This process of entombment is literalized, in the novel, in the “necropolis” Telassar, walled off from the rest of the world for more than two thousand years. According to the leader of Reuel’s expedition, some scholars suspect the existence of Telassar and strive to find it in order to prove conclusively that the origins of civilization lie in black Africa, a hypothesis hotly debated around the turn of the century. The reason for the silencing of the history of Telassar in the Western world is succinctly given by Charlie Vance, who, upon hearing from Professor Stone, the leader of the Meroe expedition, about the achievements of the ancient Ethiopians, exclaims in disbelief, “Great Scott! . . . you don’t mean to tell me that all this was done by niggers?” (532, emphasis in original). Signifi-

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cantly, after this outburst, Vance himself falls silent, for in the face of this revelation “the power of expression had left him”(534). That is to say, the sudden removal of the false ground upon which his own racial identity had been built—that of the intellectual superiority of the Anglo-American— renders any further speech on his part superfluous. The issue of silence surrounds the formation of a psychic crypt, for as Abraham and Torok argue, the process of crypt formation is accompanied by a simultaneous encryption of language: the silencing and demetaphorization that enables the preservation of the tomb alternating with the verbal clues that strive toward its discovery. It is, accordingly, “expression” in language itself that powers the search for Telassar. According to Professor Stone, philological research provides the strongest evidence for the Meroe hypothesis; the recent archaeological discovery of significant documents linked to the Cushite language proves the Ethiopian origins of ancient knowledge. Language, in this account, becomes a material tool in the process of reconstructing lost history; the resurfaced Cushite words serve as signposts indicating the direction the explorers ought to take. But while philology leads Western scholars to Ethiopia, the words themselves are not yet fully legible to them. They can piece together some of the facts, but the Ethiopian way of life remains a mystery. In contrast, Reuel finds that once he arrives in Telassar, his powers of speech magically multiply; his depressive aphasia gives way to a sudden fluency in ancient Arabic, which he has never studied. Moreover, he is able to communicate nonverbally as well; his mesmeric abilities increase tenfold, so that he is able to subdue a hungry lion simply by looking it in the eye, a skill that comes in handy more than once. The connection between verbal and affective or magnetic forms of communication is provided by Ai, the leader of Telassar’s Sages and Reuel’s personal mentor, who tells Reuel that the ancient Ethiopians transcended the boundaries of death to investigate systematically and record all the secrets of the supernatural. As he hands Reuel a written record of this knowledge, Reuel turned it over carefully,—the ivory pages were covered with characters sharply defined and finely engraved. “What language is this? It is not Hebrew, Greek nor Sanskrit, nor any form of hieroglyphic writing.” “It is the language once commonly spoken by your ancestors long before Babylon was builded. It is known to us now as the language of prophecy.” (572)

Reuel’s own considerable philological knowledge enables him to identify only what the written language he sees is not; Ai, however, knows what it is—the lost language of the prelapsarian, monolingual (and monogenist) past. The Telassarians know this as the “language of prophecy,” because,

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as Ai later explains, they could accurately foretell all that was to happen later, including the downfall and eventual resurrection of their own civilization. While present-day scholars have been using language to reconstruct history, the ancient speakers spoke history in the future tense—and spoke, moreover, in a language of perfect plenitude, a language that could fully express everything that it wished to say. Reuel’s instruction in the language of prophecy becomes the final lesson needed for him to assume his position as Ergamenes, the king. Yet his encounter with the texts written in this language is itself the culmination of a long session of instruction at Ai’s hands. In this section, Hopkins engages most directly with contemporary theories of psychology, intertwining them with the mysticism of the ancient Ethiopians to produce a transhistorical account of intersubjectivity: “. . . Our religion is a belief in One Supreme Being, the center of action in all nature. He distributed a portion of Himself at an early age to the care of man. . . . We call this ever-living faculty or soul Ego. “After its transition Ego has the power of expressing itself to other bodies, with like gift and form, its innate feeling; and by law of affinity, is ever striving to regain its original position near the great Unity; but the physical attractions of this beautiful world have such a fascination on the organism of man that there is ever a contention against the greater object being attained; and unless the Ego can wean the body from gross desires and raise it to the highest condition of human existence, it cannot be united to its Creator. The Ego preserves its individuality after the dissolution of the body. We believe in reincarnation by natural laws regulating material on earth. The Ego can never be destroyed. For instance, when the body of a good man or woman dies, and the Ego is not sufficiently fitted for the higher condition of another world, it is re-associated with another body to complete the necessary fitness for heaven.” (562)

In this fusion of Eastern and Western religion with Jamesian psychology, Hopkins represents the Ego as a traveling portion of the divine, whose primary functions are mediation of the carnal drives and communication.61 What is experienced by the organism as agency is in fact divinity; one may think of oneself as acting, but it is the “locus of action” that operates through one. Tellingly, this passage itself comes at the end of a conversation between Reuel and Ai on the practice of mummification. In Ai’s tradition, even death itself no longer acts as an absolute bar to communication; the Ethiopians’ dead remain among them, not secretly encrypted, but introjected into the fabric of the social: “There are always angels near!” (573), waiting to impart knowledge to them.62 Ai gives Reuel a magical mirror that the Ethiopians use to speak with the dead (for Reuel, the mirror is not precisely “magical” but the apotheosis of ancient technology).63 In

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Telassar, the melancholic fantasy becomes a way of life; the desire to keep one’s dead with one is no longer a pathology but an everyday truth. This utopia contrasts strongly, of course, with the intersubjective bars that mark the situation of African Americans. Hopkins’s alternative figuring of a vital (if necessarily melancholic) possibility for African diasporic community—as tenuous as it may be in the face of the encroaching tides of imperialism—is meant not to provide a literal solution to the problems faced by African Americans (for though Hopkins was a supporter of the Pan-African movement, there is no reason to suppose that she herself believed in ghosts) but to work as an imaginative critique of the American scene. Hopkins’s novel exposes the contradiction behind the melancholic subject formation into which African Americans are forced: the impossible choice between accepting a bar to full social participation or renouncing one’s heritage for mulattoes such as Reuel, and the absence of even this tortuous choice for those African Americans who cannot “pass.” The origin of Reuel’s melancholia is revealed in the African section of the novel to be an effect of his combined maternal and cultural loss: “He remembered his mother well. From her he had inherited his mysticism and his occult powers. The nature of the mystic within him was, then, but a dreamlike devotion to the spirit that had swayed his ancestors; it was the shadow of Ethiopia’s power” (558). Reuel’s mysticism is here ascribed to his maternal genealogy; yet this mysticism itself has been closely associated, as well, with his melancholia, beginning in the opening scene of the novel, which depicts him reading M. Binet’s book on mesmerism and contemplating suicide. The link between the two is explained shortly afterward, as a result of a rather pointed inquiry by Ai: “. . . [in America] it is a deep disgrace to have within the veins even one drop of the blood you seem so proud of possessing.” “That explains your isolation from our race, then?” Reuel bowed his head in assent, while over his face passed a flush of shame. He felt keenly now the fact that he had played the coward’s part in hiding his origin. (560)

Just as the “blood” he has so carefully hidden rushes to his face once Ai calls it out, the shame Reuel experiences marks the recognition of a severed identification, the secret that has lain buried in him up to this point in the narrative.64 In Telassar, Reuel’s silence about his racial origins is converted into speech, an act central to the resurfacing of the melancholic crypt. This trope of converting silence into speech is repeated several times in the Ethiopian section of the novel—in Jim Titus’s deathbed confession of his own long-concealed duplicity, in the lessons Reuel learns about the material presence of the dead, and especially in the recitative that marks Reuel’s

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coronation as King Ergamenes. In this scene, a vocal musical performance presents the story of Telassar, explicating both its ancient glories and its fall from grace into “dumb suffering” (558). The affecting performance recalls Dianthe’s earlier vocal renditions of past experience. This performance, however, does not strike its listeners dumb but moves them to nearecstatic speech: “Upon his companions the song of the past of Ethiopia had a strange effect. Soothing at times, at times exciting, with the last notes from the instruments the company sprang to their feet; with flashing dark eyes, faces reflecting inward passions, they drew their short, saberlike arms and circled around Reuel’s throne with the shout, ‘Ergamenes! Ergamenes!’ ” (559). Unlike the audience of Dianthe’s song, which was frozen into an individuating, isolating living death by the overwhelming force of the suffering she transmitted, the act of bearing witness to history moves the residents of Telassar to collective action; Hopkins’s implications for the African American reading public are clear. Hopkins’s deployment of melancholia as an act of critical imagining recalls (or rather, precalls) Freud’s valorization of the melancholic, his conviction that the melancholic has “a keener eye for the truth than others who are not melancholic.” In Hopkins’s exploration of melancholia, the melancholic attains self-knowledge through his or her “keen eye” for lost cultural knowledge that impinges upon the self. Reuel’s transformation from downtrodden medical student to Ethiopian king allegorizes the potential effect of creating contexts in which to develop and vocalize this superior insight. Yet although Hopkins’s novel is, as I have argued, most concerned with the regeneration of black community, it also insists that it is not only African Americans who are rendered melancholic by racial segregation and the legacies of slavery, though Anglo-Americans are, presumably, more easily able to repress their knowledge of the loss that segregation poses to them. The association of blackness with a “primitive” lack of selfconsciousness and agency in the Anglo-American psyche enables, as I have argued, both a denial of death and its projection onto the figure of the racial Other, whose distancing as other becomes essential to the maintenance of a stable white self. Yet when that distancing begins to break down, the subject responds with a concerted, even violent, effort to reinscribe it. At the turn of the century, as white American identity was thrown into crisis by the emergence of a generation of African Americans with no personal experience of slavery alongside the influx of non-Anglo European and Asian immigrants to North America, the drive to maintain racial hierarchy took a particularly violent turn. Of One Blood poses a challenge to this rigor mortis of the Anglo-American psyche through the transformation undergone, in the novel, by the character of Charlie Vance. Charlie has taken his trip to Africa not for knowledge but for pure pleasure; once there, however, he finds himself uncomfortable with the lessons he is forced to

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learn. When he and Jim Titus stumble upon the hidden entrance to Telassar, Charlie engages in a debate with Ai over American race discrimination: “Is it possible [thought Charlie] that the ubiquitous race question has got ahead of the expedition! By mighty, it’s time something was done to stop this business. Talk of Banquo’s ghost! Banquo ain’t in it if this is the race question I’m up against.” Aloud he said, “My venerable and esteemed friend, you could get there all right with your complexion in my country. We would simply label you, ‘Arab, Turk, Malay or Filipino,’ and in that costume you’d slide along all right; not the slightest trouble when you showed your ticket at the door. Savee?” He finished with a profound bow. Ai eyed him sadly for a moment, and then said,— “O, flippant-tongued offspring of an ungenerous people, how is it with my brother?” and he took Jim’s unresisting hand and led him up to Charlie. . . . Charlie felt embarrassed in spite of his assurance. “Well, of course, it has been the custom to count Africans as our servants, and they have fared as servants.” (584–85)

Charlie’s flippant-tongued address to Ai, whom he recognizes as an important figure but mocks nevertheless, prefigures Frantz Fanon’s description of the simplified speech of the colonizer to the native.65 As Fanon argues, this diminished, distorted form of communication impoverishes language, emptying it of complexity, just as the “custom” of American discrimination, as Charlie is made to admit, fixes the African American in a subordinate position and denies democratic mobility. Yet Charlie’s subsequent escape attempt with Jim changes his thinking: “. . . as he clasped Jim’s toilhardened black hand, he told himself that Ai’s words were true. Where was the color line now? Jim was a brother; the nearness of their desolation in this uncanny land, left nothing but a feeling of brotherhood” (590). Jim and Charlie’s isolation from familiar contexts in Telassar brings upon Charlie a kind of refamiliarization: his recognition of Jim as “brother” and his endorsement of Ai’s critical speech over his own “flippant” utterances. If demetaphorization, or the “emptying” of language, always accompanies melancholia, then the fantasy of restoring meaning to words marks its cure. The “emptied” language with which Hopkins’s last novel is most concerned is foregrounded in its title: it is the reduction of the many discourses of blood to the “one-drop” rule meant to limit African American mobility. The one-drop rule did not exist simply to identify who, in America, counted as black; it also enforced what blackness counted as. Blood served as a signifier not only of race but of racial valuation as well. In marked counterpoint to this impoverishment of meaning, Hopkins’s novel simultaneously deploys a number of discourses of blood, mobilizing, at once, ideas drawn from monogenism, eugenism, black nationalism, theories of kinship, and maternalism.66

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The uncertain generativity of the African American body in crisis forms the center of Of One Blood’s textual and narrative melancholia. The oftrepeated phrase “of one blood” itself plays upon this uncertainty; it embodies both the denied truth, spoken by Ai, that Charlie Vance comes to recognize (“And yet, ye are all of one blood, descended from one common father” [585]) and the hidden truth of the incestuous relations among Mira’s children (“Yes, honey: all of one blood!” [607]). The tension between the endorsement of racial monogenism and the prohibition of familial incest is resolved, in the final pages of the novel, by Reuel’s resettlement in Telassar, away from the potentially incestuous disarray of the American scene that is the legacy of slavery. Here, the assertion of monogenism is safely compatible with an independent black nationalism, and the novel closes with the prediction, “. . . He will prove his words, ‘Of one blood have I made all races of men’ ” (621). Though the evidence given for monogenism here is biblical, Hopkins’s novel also partakes of the scientistic discourses of black eugenism that circulated at the turn of the century, discourses that argued for the need to maintain and protect African racial identity against amalgamation into the white race.67 Reuel’s eventual betrothal to the pure-blooded Ethiopian queen Candace enables him to “. . . give to the world a dynasty of darkskinned rulers, whose destiny should be to restore the prestige of an ancient people” (570). Yet the incontrovertible presence of this program for “perpetuating a history of the Negro race” in Of One Blood has given some present-day critics pause. Cynthia Schrager, for example, has argued that . . . two contrasting models of racial identity coexist in [Hopkins’s] novel, much like two contradictory or “split” personalities might inhabit a single body, a “double-consciousness” that is present in the duality of the very title Of One Blood, or, The Hidden Self. . . . On the one hand, the novel’s secondary title, The Hidden Self, suggests a model of racial identity that is fluid, indeterminate, and socially constructed; on the other hand, the novel’s primary title Of One Blood invokes an essentialist notion of racial identity.68

Schrager’s rendition of this fact as a conflict or “contradiction,” however, reads past the very terms of Hopkins’s work in its imposition of a reflexive antiessentialism: the need to see all that is progressive as “socially constructed” and all that is “essentialist” as necessarily static and limiting—the need, that is, for psychology to contradict rather than complement physiology.69 Yet Hopkins’s deployment of the notion of the hidden self conveys less a sense of fluid indeterminacy than of compulsory race-memory. The psychic phantoms that inhabit the characters, however enabling they may eventually become, are not willfully chosen by the characters themselves; in fact, they emphasize, as I have noted, the limits of self-construction. Nor does the phrase “of one blood” evoke only an essentialist notion of racial

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identity, since the “race” it unites is at once the black race and the human race. As habituated as (post)modern thought has become to resisting essentializing reductions, the extent to which this automatic association of social construction and “fluid indeterminacy” radically disables the work Hopkins was trying to do may not be immediately apparent. This assumption, however, overlooks the terms of her interrogation of the social situation of the subject: not the process by which such meanings were generated, but the conditions in and through which they were both socially and psychically instituted. The critical defensiveness against “essentialism” that underlies Schrager’s underreading of Hopkins’s title emerges, of course, from an attack on biological determinism and the civil limitations it supposedly justifies—an opposition with which Hopkins’s work is wholly in sympathy. Yet in a novel as filled with tropes of mixing as Of One Blood, the search for a “pure” social-constructionism untainted by the presence of the body as such seems rather like wishful thinking; and while wishful thinking, in this utopian narrative, stands as a powerful mode of critique, it is not, as I have already argued, meant to provide a blueprint for concrete practice. Hopkins’s deployment of the metaphorics of blood does not categorize her as “for” or “against” essentialism per se. Rather, her conception of blood establishes it as itself a form of writing on and in the body, whose significance is both inescapable and never entirely determined. Just as the descent of the royal Ethiopian bloodline is marked by a sign on the body that enables recognition (the lotus-lily), the presence of circulating blood within the novel signifies the transmission of knowledge. From Mira’s prophecy of the “trail of blood” that will end slavery (487), through Charlie’s echoing of Ai’s phrase, “Ye are all of one blood,” to the description of Candace as “an animated statue, in which one saw the blood circulate, and from which life flowed” (568), blood in motion carries positive change throughout the narrative. In contrast, static blood suggests a congealing of agency in the face of trauma; Dianthe’s frozen blood and desperate cries as she learns of her incestuous relations echo the speech of the “pallid lip[ped]” Reuel after hearing the same story from Jim Titus, who “cursed with a mighty curse the bond that bound him to the white race of his native land” (584)— that is, his white blood. Whiteness itself brings a kind of living death to the black characters in the novel, most notably in the story of Dianthe’s decline. As she is forced by Aubrey to drink the poison she had intended to give him, she sits before him “white and silent as the grave” (610); and the poison itself works to create a kind of exaggerated corporeal whiteness: “. . . she went to the window and flung wide the hangings, letting in a flood of light upon the pale, worn face reflected in the mirror. What a wondrous change was there! The long white drapery of her morning robe fell about her like a shroud; yet,

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white as it was, [it] contrasted painfully with the livid ash-hue of her skin” (612). Dianthe’s paleness, metaphorizing the grave and a burial shroud, signifies the presence of death; moreover, this death is both encased within her and itself encases her, since she cannot communicate with anyone in her isolation. The servants of the household, alerted to her illness only by Aubrey’s repeated inquiries after her, amusedly ascribe his concern to “the anxiety of bridegrooms over the welfare of brides” (611). The irony of the servants’ mistaken belief that pregnancy is at the root of the couple’s anxiety is that Dianthe has been reduced to complete non(re)productivity; although she once made entire audiences weep, on her own deathbed she cannot produce even a single tear. Dianthe’s sterility evokes nineteenthcentury white eugenist assertions that the “mulelike” mulatta was incapable of reproduction,70 although it is clear here that it is not blood admixture that is the culprit but the excessive inscription of whiteness, in all its forms, on her body. Still, the narrative does insist that her blood heritage has played some part in her downfall: “Let no human eye behold the writhings of that suffering face, the torture of that soul unmoored, and cast upon the sea of wildest passion, without the pilot, principle, or captain of all salvation, God, to trust in,—passion, adoration of a human idol, hereditary traits entirely unbalanced, generous, but fervid impulses, her only guides” (612–13). Dianthe’s deranged mind, in the weeks before her death, is here explained in part by an “unbalanced” genetic or genealogical makeup, an imbalance that accounts for the excess of her passions and the poverty of her judgment. From her first incarnation as a “passing shadow” outside Reuel’s window to her final appearance as a ghost who calls Aubrey Livingston back to judgment, Dianthe exists in a living death. Dianthe’s character is contrasted, in the novel, to that of Candace, whose resemblance to Dianthe in both appearance and voice is so strong that it brings to Reuel’s eyes the tears Dianthe cannot herself produce. Yet Candace’s stability and strength stand as an implicit critique of Dianthe’s weakness and passion; while Dianthe cries out, on her sickbed, for Reuel, “Give me the benefit of your powerful will” (475), Candace coolly inquires of him, “And dost thou agree, and are thou willing to accept the destiny planned by the Almighty Trinity for thee and me from the beginning of all things, my lord?” (569). Though Dianthe, when she is conscious at all, is described as “childlike” and “pleading,” Candace’s command is unquestionable: “in her smile of grace and sweetness lurked a sense of power” (569). And while Dianthe’s appearance in the narrative is nearly always heralded by words evoking death, stillness, or rigidity—she is most often compared to a cold marble statue—Candace is the “animated statue” from whom all life flows. The narrative replacement of Dianthe with Candace completes the cycle of reincarnation—of regeneration—that is the novel’s ultimate project. Dianthe is brought back

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from the dead a number of times—first by Reuel, who erases her past and turns her into the white woman Felice Adams, then by Aubrey, who gives her back her own name but forces her into her mother’s position as mistress to her own brother, and finally as Candace, who can combine the affective productivity that is Dianthe’s stock in trade with a material (re)productivity, unsullied by the traumas of the past, since she is “the embodiment of all chastity” (569)—a blank slate on which black racial identity may be rewritten. Yet while Candace’s centrality to the novel’s prediction of African diasporic regeneration of culture is clear, it is less certain how the maternalist record of African American experience will play itself out in this new scene. For although Dianthe’s passivity throughout the narrative has given rise to the view that, as Claudia Tate puts it, the novel has “silenced the discourse of female agency,”71 this impression is altered if one reads the melodrama on its own melancholic terms, attending to the way the dead, as well as the living, influence its outcome. The most powerful figure in the narrative is the phantom Mira, whose complicated history both threatens to destroy her children’s lives and points the way to their salvation. Mira’s power is reproduced, in turn, by her own mother, Hannah, who is “the most noted ‘voodoo’ doctor or witch in the country” (603). Both Mira and Hannah, as Kasanoff has observed, appear as the marginal excess to text: Mira inscribes her name in, and resignifies, the Bible, and Hannah is identified by Dianthe as “a princess . . . such as no dainty pen of gold would write of in a fairy book” (603). The stories they speak challenge the “official” narrative, for just as Mira refuses to remain submissive to the elder Livingston’s vision of order in her prophetic trances, Hannah contests the version of Mira’s life recounted by Aubrey. According to her, Mira was sold away from the family not because of Livingston’s rage at her prediction but because his wife’s jealousy of their affair “made de house too hot to hol’ Mira” (605). Hannah’s revenge on the Livingstons is to introduce Mira’s son into their family line; Mira herself may be banished, but her lineage will eventually bring the house down. Hannah’s recognition of the dangers of collaborating with white women is echoed in the novel by Dianthe’s victimization at the hands of the (presumably white) traveling woman mesmerist, whose continual hypnosis of Dianthe weakens her mind, leading to her deathlike trance. Even the hyperpassive Dianthe, however, ultimately manages a triumph by reappearing once more as a spirit, hand in hand with the ghost of Molly Vance, to lead Aubrey into the presence of the Ethiopian rulers and secure his death. Yet while African American women are accorded a significant degree of control over the fates of both black and white Americans in the novel, the continuation of this power in Telassar is masked. Despite Candace’s visible strength, her first act, upon seeing Reuel, is to throw herself at his feet,

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where she remains for most of the scene that follows. But following her ritual observance of the forms of feminine submissiveness, she enacts a striking role reversal. In the betrothal ceremony that closes the scene, it is she who places the ring (formed, of course, in the shape of a lotus-lily) upon Reuel’s finger and pronounces, “Thus do I claim thee for all eternity” (571). Marking Reuel with the lotus-lily as belonging to her own culture, Candace continues the matriarchal tradition established by Hannah and Mira; she is the final means of inscribing upon his “white, unsullied page” (473) the dark-skinned dynasty that is to follow. While Reuel, at the close of the novel, has yet to master fully the language of prophecy, it appears that Candace can already fluently speak and write it. Though formal control in the hidden city is ascribed to Reuel and his council of twenty-five male Sages, the affective and maternal power that has maintained African American survival seems to continue, as it were, undercover. The mesmeric power that passes through the maternal lineage in Of One Blood brings to mind Houston Baker’s assertion that it is a “different, sometimes invisible” cultural work that regenerates black community; for although the generative influence exercised by the maternal phantom is illegible to the rational public sphere, it is nonetheless pervasive in this account.72 If the “erasure” Tate points to is not, then, precisely that, her sense of the difficulty of ascertaining black female agency in the novel is still only in part ameliorated by reading around the “fact” of death. In sum, black women have power over birth and death in the narrative, while the male Sages control everything in between; that is to say, female agency remains, in a sense, melancholic. The “undercover” status of women’s control of the story echoes the way that Hopkins’s own definitive influence on the Colored American Magazine was occluded by her official recognition as editor of only the “women’s department.” Hopkins’s name appeared on the masthead as editor only in 1904, after the close of the serialization of Of One Blood and soon before she was ousted. Intriguingly, Hopkins also disguised some of her own writing in the magazine by publishing it under her mother’s name, Sarah A. Allen. In the same way, the plot of Of One Blood itself uncannily parallels Hopkins’s own literary career; her writing, as has been noted, fell out of the public eye as the journals to which she contributed went out of print, her effects were destroyed in the fire that killed her, and only a single text, Contending Forces, survived in book form to point the way for latter-day scholars to rediscover her work. This parallel is uncanny, however, not only because it is another of the weird coincidences upon which Hopkins’s plots so often turned, but because, on another level, it is so very familiar. Hopkins spent her own life revivifying occluded history; a century later, scholars continue the same process by relocating her. This compulsory repetition (itself another trope favored by Hopkins) gestures toward the difficulty of thinking psychology through history, and

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vice versa; for if, as Hopkins shows, the posited “facts” of history (racial and national as well as individual) always impact the formation of psychology, both as theory and on the level of subjectivity, so too does psychology (the desire to identify, the affinitive and imitative drives, the fantasy of perfect communication) play itself out as history. The elaboration of theories of the psyche in this historical period did not simply provide a means of commenting upon history, but in itself constituted part of the production of this history; as such, any theory marked and distorted by the uncritical absorption of social hierarchies of race actually aided in reproducing them, by naturalizing civic and economic limitations as the psychic poverty of the primitive, who supposedly lacked the capacity for self-consciousness. This failure of self-awareness on the part of psychological theory also prevented it from being able to develop the tools with which to address the inevitably psychological, as well as historical, effects of this impoverishment on both sides of the “color line.” Of One Blood invokes this pattern as a paradox: the desire to (re)produce a fully literate, agential, and self-aware black publicity at the turn of the century underlies the circulation of its myriad historical references and discursive forms; yet the restoration of “full meaning” to these forms (as well as the authority black women can display over their production) is ultimately deferred, ceded, on the novel’s last page, to an “omnipotence” whose location is never specified. Like the psychically imprisoned testimonial diva Dianthe, the novel itself can’t transcend its own location; it can only (repeatedly) expose it; and its poetics of exposure are always situated as the necessary precondition for progress, critical publicity, or what we might, in a psychological sense, call growth. The novel’s last word belongs to Dianthe after all; its final deferral speaks to the reader precisely as her singing compelled her audiences: try and live through this. NOTES

I would like to thank Lois Brown, Peter Coviello, Eleanor Courtemanche, Barbara Mennell, Jeff Schneider, Pamela Thurschwell, and the editors of the present volume for their helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this essay. 1. Pauline E. Hopkins, Contending Forces: A Romance of Life North and South (Boston: Colored Co-operative Publishing Company, 1900), preface, 3, emphasis in original. 2. In this sense, I am in agreement with Judith Butler’s recent observation that “the account of melancholy is an account of how psychic and social domains are produced in relation to one another” ( Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997], 167); however, I find Butler’s understanding of the social insufficiently concrete and, paradoxically, less useful as a means of understanding the specific historical conditions of melancholic nationality than the psychoanalytic work of Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok,

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particularly The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, trans. and ed. Nicholas T. Rand (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1994). Although Abraham and Torok’s analysis remains at the level of individual pathology, their understanding of transgenerational phenomena such as the “phantom” provides richer ground for an account of the impact of silenced or lost histories on marginalized social groups. 3. See Claudia Tate, “Pauline Hopkins: Our Literary Foremother,” in Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, ed. Marjorie Pryse and Hortense Spillers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 53–66. Tate has revised this view in Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine’s Text at the Turn of the Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), although she critiques Of One Blood on other grounds, a point to which I will return at the end of this essay. 4. Hopkins’s influence over the magazine was significant; although she was identified in its first issue as editor of the “women’s department,” most commentators agree that she played a decisive role in shaping the entire publication. After the journal was purchased in 1904 by Fred R. Moore, an ally of Booker T. Washington, and its administrative offices were moved to New York City, Hopkins left the staff; a notice in the journal proclaimed that she was resigning for health reasons, but historians have generally accepted W. E. B. Du Bois’s contention that she was forced out because of irreconcilable political differences with Moore and Washington. For a more extensive treatment of Hopkins’s career, see Nellie T. McKay, “Introduction,” in The Unruly Voice: Rediscovering Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, ed. John Cullen Gruesser (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 1–20. See also Lois L. Brown, Black Daughter of the Revolution, forthcoming. 5. Colored American Magazine, announcement, May 1900. 6. Colored American Magazine, announcement, May 1900. 7. See Benedict Anderson’s discussion of nationalism and print culture in his Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991). Michael Warner’s The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990) addresses the way that journals functioned as the “metonymic embodiment of the public sphere” in revolutionary America. 8. Colored American Magazine, Editors’ and Publishers’ announcements, May 1900, p. 60. 9. Booker T. Washington, “Industrial Education for the Negro,” in The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative American Negroes of To-day (New York: Arno Press, 1963), 17. 10. Washington, “Industrial Education for the Negro,” 29, 16. 11. See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993). Stanley Aronowitz’s “Is a Democracy Possible? The Decline of the Public in the American Debate” discusses the way this perceived loss has impacted American political theory. See Aronowitz in The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 75–92. 12. In particular, W. E. B. Du Bois, initially a supporter of the industrialeducation movement, had become by the turn of the century so estranged by Washington’s accommodationism that he charged him, in The Souls of Black Folk, with sowing the “seeds . . . for a harvest of disaster.” Washington and other African Amer-

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ican conservatives, in Du Bois’s analysis, did a grave disservice in neglecting the value of black self-assertion, in deferring the question of civil rights, and in representing a national, indeed international, crisis as a question for the race alone. See W. E. B. Du Bois, “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others,” in The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Bantam Book, 1989; originally published 1903), 40. 13. Hopkins’s article on Washington in her Colored American series, “Famous Men of the Negro Race” (Colored American Magazine, October 1901, 436–41), warned that he would be judged by history. For a reading of Hopkins’s historical and biographical writing, see C. K. Doreski, “Inherited Rhetoric and Authentic History: Pauline Hopkins at the Colored American Magazine,” in The Unruly Voice, ed. Gruesser, 71–97. 14. Internationalism was part of the Colored American’s market practice as well as its rhetoric; it maintained a sales office in Liberia as well as in many U.S. localities. 15. Colored American Magazine, Editors’ and Publishers’ announcements, May 1900, 60. 16. Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” in The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Robbins, 273–74. Quoted in part in Houston Baker, “Critical Memory and the Black Public Sphere,” in The Black Public Sphere, ed. the Black Public Sphere Collective (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 16. 17. Baker, “Critical Memory and the Black Public Sphere,” 16. 18. The notion of publicity that I am utilizing here owes less to strictly Habermasian formulations of the public sphere than to revisions, such as Nancy Fraser’s work on subaltern counterpublics, which stress the critical capacity of sub- or counterpublics. See Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), 109–42, and the essays in the Public Culture volume The Black Public Sphere. 19. As Hazel Carby observes, given black literacy and income rates at the turn of the century, the possibility of a periodical entirely supported by black readers succeeding in the literary marketplace was unlikely; see Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). Yet Hopkins maintained, in the periodical’s pages, that her work was directed to a black readership; when a white reader, for example, wrote in to protest the representation of an interracial romance in one of Hopkins’s stories, the writer politely replied that the reader’s preferences were irrelevant. 20. See Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). The valorization of cultural plenitude has a long history in black studies, from W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903), to Albert Murray’s The Omni-Americans: New Perspectives on Black Experience and American Culture (New York: Outerbridge and Dierstfreg, 1970), to recent work by Baker and many others on black critical publicity. 21. The essay, identified in the novel as “The Unclassified Residuum,” by M. Binet, is really an excerpt from the article “The Hidden Self,” by William James. See “The Hidden Self,” reprinted in William James, Essays in Psychology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 247–68.

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22. Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, Of One Blood, or, The Hidden Self, in The Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 621. Further references are cited parenthetically within the text. 23. Hubertus Tellerbach, Melancholy: History of the Problem, Endogeneity, Typology, Pathogenesis, Clinical Considerations (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1961), 12. 24. On the sentimental fantasy, see Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint, forthcoming; and Shirley Samuels, ed., The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). On melodrama, see Michael Hays and Anastasia Nikolopolou, eds., Melodrama: The Cultural Emergence of a Genre (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996); Christine Gledhill, ed., Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Women’s Film (London: BFI, 1987); and Jeffrey Mason, Melodrama and the Myth of America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). 25. See Julia Stern, “Excavating Genre in Our Nig,” in American Literature 67, no. 3 (fall 1995): 439–66. 26. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychoanalytic Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 237–58. 27. See Stanley W. Jackson, Melancholia and Depression from Hippocratic Times to the Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). 28. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia.” 29. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 246. 30. Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 3. 31. Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia, 32. 32. Along these lines, Freud observes that the more melancholic a woman is, the more properly feminine she is. He notes in “Mourning and Melancholia”: “A good, capable, conscientious woman will speak no better of herself after she develops melancholia than one who is actually worthless; indeed, the first is actually more likely to fall ill of the disease than the other, of whom we too should have nothing good to say” (247). 33. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, The Freudian Subject, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988). 34. See Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic (New York: Routledge, 1992); also Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). 35. I should note that here race, as such, is a stand-in for culture in a sense, since what is played upon in the melancholic fantasy is not the mere fact of racial difference but the cultural distinctions that race metonymizes. Although Of One Blood does not, as I will later explain, see race as purely socially constructed, the emphasis on its cultural referents features strongly in both theories of melancholia and the novel itself. 36. For example, Sander Gilman, in Freud, Race and Gender, asserts that the construction of woman as “other” in psychoanalysis results from a defensive projection on the part of Freud, who was himself a racial or cultural “other.” Although Gilman himself does not go so far as to claim that racial difference is “the truth” of psycho-

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analysis, the terms in which he casts his argument imply as much; for example, he refers more than once to “the transmutation of the rhetoric of race into the construction of gender.” See Sander L. Gilman, Freud, Race and Gender (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). 37. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, “Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation,” in The Shell and the Kernel, chapter 5, 125–38. 38. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 243. 39. See Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, “‘The Lost Object—Me’: Notes on Endocryptic Identification,” in The Shell and the Kernel, 139–56. 40. Hopkins was herself familiar with William James’s work, since she took both the subtitle of her last novel and a significant intertext in its first chapter directly from his writing. Cynthia Schrager has usefully traced out the connections between James’s essay on the hidden self and Hopkins’s novel, although I disagree with some of her conclusions, a point to which I will later return. See Cynthia Schrager, “The New Psychology and the Politics of Race: Pauline Hopkins and William James,” in The Unruly Voice, ed. Gruesser, 182–210. 41. William James, “The Sick Soul,” in The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Macmillan, 1961; originally published 1902), 114–42. 42. James, “The Sick Soul,” 138, emphasis in original. 43. Statues of cats, who were gods in the ancient Egyptian tradition, were buried with the mummified dead as a sort of blessing. Given the intense public interest that surrounded the emerging discipline of Egyptology in this period and his own study of religions, James would have known this. 44. Sigmund Freud, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” (1915), in The Standard Edition of the Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, 273–302. 45. Kenneth Warren, Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 46. Warren, Black and White Strangers, chapter 1. 47. Du Bois, “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others,” 35. 48. See Schrager, “The New Psychology and the Politics of Race.” 49. Hortense Spillers discusses the ethical necessity of psychoanalysis in addressing racial identification in her paper “‘All the Things You Could Be by Now, If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother’: Psychoanalysis and Race,” in Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, ed. Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, and Helene Moglen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 135–58. 50. See Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 51. See Judith Berzon, Neither White nor Black: The Mulatto Character in American Fiction (New York: New York University Press, 1978). 52. See especially Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig, or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-Story White House, North, Showing that Slavery’s Shadows Fall Even There (New York: Random House, 1983; originally published 1859). Wilson’s deployment of the mulatta protagonist as the abandoned child of a white mother implicitly chastises white abolitionist and feminist inaction on issues of racism beyond the institution of slavery itself. 53. See Robert H. Cataliotti, The Music in African-American Fiction (New York: Garland Publishing, 1995).

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54. See Tate, Domestic Allegories of Political Desire. 55. William Wells Brown, Clotel, or, The President’s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1996). 56. The details about Mira in this passage are taken almost verbatim from a case study by M. Janet, quoted in the aforementioned essay “The Hidden Self,” by William James: “. . . when in her normal state, this poor peasant-woman is a serious and rather sad person, very mild with everyone, and extremely timid. . . . But hardly is she put to sleep hypnotically than a metamorphosis occurs. . . . She is gay, noisy, restless, sometimes insupportably so. She remains good-natured, but has acquired a singular tendency to irony and sharp jesting. Nothing is more curious than to hear her . . .” (M. Janet, De l’Automatisme psychologique, quoted in William James, “The Hidden Self,” 98). 57. Maria Torok, “Story of Fear: The Symptoms of Phobia—the Return of the Repressed or the Return of the Phantom?” in The Shell and the Kernel, 177–86, quotation from 181, emphasis in original. 58. Nicholas T. Rand, “Secrets and Posterity: The Theory of the Transgenerational Phantom,” editor’s note, in Abraham and Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, 169. 59. See Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: William Morrow, 1984), chapter 2. 60. The “first” American novel, William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy (Boston: Isaiah Thomas, 1789), also narrates the tale of a brother and sister who, unknown to one another as siblings, plot to marry and die of grief after their familial relationship is revealed. As Ann Dalke reports, a number of novels published in the United States before the nineteenth century have incest as a central theme. Dalke argues that these novels reflect a cultural preoccupation with how to manage and limit the openness of democracy. See Ann Dalke, “Original Vice: The Political Implications of Incest in the Early American Novel,” Early American Literature 23, no. 2 (1988): 188–201. 61. The classical version of this understanding of the self is elaborated in Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self (New York: Pantheon, 1986). 62. One of William James’s most sustained interrogations into the encryption of language in spirit writing also concerns the communications received by a young man from the ancient spirits. The young man finds himself writing in an unknown language and is able, after much philological research, to translate these writings. The longest transmission he received could easily stand as an affective summary of Of One Blood; it reads, in part: . . . I have watched thee, O son of the Nile! Thy tears have been my tears; thy joys have been my joys; thy woes have been my woes. O son of the Nile, I love thee! O son of the Nile, I love thee! My heart yearns for the days of thy glory. My heart opens to thy heart. O son of the Nile, how I love thee! Thy sands are now the way of the stranger; thy plains are now the path of the poor; thy fields are now the wastes of the day. Thy hope is gone; thy day has fled; thy years are gone. O son of Egypt, I have loved, loved, loved, loved thee! Thy day shall rise again. . . .

See William James, “A Case of Psychic Automatism” (1896), in Essays in Psychical Research (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 157.

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63. When the mirror refuses to allow Reuel to speak with Dianthe, Ai declares that this is categorical proof that she is, for the moment, alive. 64. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tompkins,” Critical Inquiry 21, no. 2 (winter 1995): 496–522. 65. See Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), chapter 1. 66. See Jennie Kasanoff, “‘Fate Has Linked Us Together’: Blood, Gender and the Politics of Representation in Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood,” in The Unruly Voice, ed. Gruessen, 158–81. Kasanoff argues that the implicit grounding of the ideal of the New Negro in theories of the African American body has been overlooked by postmodern critics who wish to see references to “blood” in New Negro writing as signifying upon, but never reifying, Anglo-American scientific essentialisms. I will return to this critical tendency momentarily in the text. 67. While many of the more alarmist eugenicist tracts themselves took their “evidence” from biblical rather than biological sources, Darwinian theory was also manipulated to add credence to these claims. Hopkins’s work draws upon and refigures both sources of evidence. 68. Schrager, “The New Psychology and the Politics of Race,” 199–200. 69. See Sedgwick and Frank, “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold”; also Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989). 70. For one example, see William D. Smith, The Color Line: A Brief on Behalf of the Unborn (New York: McClure, Phillips, 1906). 71. Tate, Domestic Allegories of Political Desire, 208. 72. As Claudia Tate and Ann DuCille have recently pointed out, marriage and maternity were crucial issues of enfranchisement for African American women at the turn of the century; accordingly, the centrality of the marriage plot in African American women’s fiction of this period testifies to the desire for social respectability and freedom from slavery. See Tate, Domestic Allegories of Political Desire; and Ann DuCille, The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). However, as both writers point out, the desire for respectability often required black women writers to mask or silence erotic yearnings, particularly those not wedded to the marriage plot, in their texts. Siobhan Somerville has recently analyzed the way that lesbian desire returns to haunt Hopkins’s first novel, Contending Forces. See Somerville, “Passing through the Closet in Pauline E. Hopkins’s Contending Forces,” American Literature 69, no. 1 (March 1997): 139–66. On the specific connection of melancholia to proscribed forms of desire, see the work of Judith Butler, especially The Psychic Life of Power.

Douglas Crimp

Melancholia and Moralism

In the national gay-bashing media frenzy over so-called gay serial killer Andrew Cunanan, the man who shot Gianni Versace in the summer of 1997, the compelling question was, Why did he do it? What happened to this “excessively charming” guy that set him on a murder spree? There was a lot of wild speculation—about the fear of aging (at twenty-seven!), the inevitable result of dabbling in S&M,1 or just running out of luck—but what finally made sense as an explanation was the conjecture that Cunanan had tested HIV-positive back in San Diego and so sought his revenge on other gay men.2 Insistently clear in the tenor of this conjecture—and in the obvious disappointment when it was later reported that Cunanan posthumously tested HIV-negative—was that it would have simply and definitively solved the whole bizarre mystery. If he had indeed tested positive, no more explanation for his killing spree would need to be sought. This conclusion was presented by the media as so foregone, as having such utterly compelling logic, that no one seemed able to reply with much more compelling evidence: Hundreds of thousands of gay men have tested HIV-positive over the course of the AIDS epidemic, yet, so far as we know, not one of them has turned into a killer as a result. Why then does the “logic” so magically trump the evidence? What exactly is this logic? Remember Patient Zero? As portrayed by Randy Shilts in And the Band Played On, he was the Canadian flight attendant who brought AIDS to North America, the vengeful guy who would switch on the lights after a bathhouse encounter, point to his Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions, and say to his sex partner, “I’m going to die and so are you.”3 Skepticism about this story was, to Shilts, “the typical crap I get from certain segments of the gay press. . . . The fact is, Patient Zero did exist. . . . The mainstream press loved my book.”4 Indeed, they did. Patient Zero was just the scapegoat they were looking 188

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for. Not only did his story “explain” how AIDS spread throughout America, but also the explanation had all the attraction of a story everybody already knew—the story of gay men’s sexual compulsion coupled with murderous irresponsibility. In the meantime Shilts himself became a minor media celebrity and the media spokesperson on gay and AIDS issues in the United States, until he himself succumbed to the disease. Shilts’s popular success and the tactics that won him that success have not been lost on the current generation of gay journalists. And so, sadly, the homophobia and scapegoating of HIV-positive gay men that was fueled by Shilts’s Patient Zero story have been revived. The turning point was Michelangelo Signorile’s New York Times op-ed piece “H.I.V.-Positive, and Careless,” published in February 1995.5 In the piece, Signorile misrepresents prevention theorist Walt Odets’s plea for safe-sex information targeted specifically at HIV-negative men to be a condemnation of sensitivity toward HIV-positive men, and in the process he pits the two groups against each other.6 Signorile acknowledges having had unsafe sex and being afraid to be tested. His solution to the emotional conflict brought about by these circumstances is to look for someone to blame. He doesn’t condemn positive men outright. Instead, he indicts “Byzantine AIDS organizations” for their refusal “to emphasize the particular responsibilities of HIV-positive men.” He then goes on to blame positive men by inference. After suggesting that his own unsafe activity might result from misplaced confidence after testing negative, he writes, “On the other hand, I’m frightened that finding out I was positive might also play into my carefree nature, that I might in my darkest moments care little about the concerns of an HIVnegative man.” To understand just what Signorile is saying here, we should read his elaboration of this statement as it appeared in his Out magazine column on the same subject: “Not knowing my status seems to keep me concerned about putting others at risk, perhaps because I understand personally their struggle to remain HIV-negative. But if I knew I were positive, I’m afraid that in my darkest moments I might have less concern for my partners, that I might be less inclined to sympathize with the difficulties of HIV-negative guys.”7 In the psychic mechanism known as projection, Signorile defends against his internal conflicts about having unsafe sex by expelling his fears outward. He takes his imagined positive self as the reality of men who are actually positive and thus assumes positive men are unable to sympathize with those who are negative and are perfectly willing to infect them. Signorile magically converts his worries about his own risky behavior into fear of the irresponsibility of HIV-positive men. The temporality of the shift to a renewed climate of moralism signaled by Signorile’s “H.I.V.-Positive, and Careless” is clearly captured in the following: “Ten years ago the gay community was fighting off hate-mongers

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who were intent on locking up H.I.V.-positive people; as a community we needed to foster self-esteem among H.I.V.-positive gay men and to guard against attempts to stigmatize them. Now it seems that some of what we did for those who are positive was at the expense of those who are desperately trying to stay negative.”8 “Ten years ago,” attempts to stigmatize HIVpositive people seemed a legitimate concern, while “now”. . . what? Stigma is no longer a problem? Sensitivity to stigma has become too burdensome? Has hurt those who are negative? Has prevented us from demanding “responsibility” from those who are positive? Several assumptions appear to be operating here. First—and this is a distortion of recent history that appears throughout Signorile’s writings and those of his fellow mainstream gay journalists—is the dangerous and counterfactual view that homophobia and AIDS phobia are no longer the threats they were “ten years ago.” Second is the implication that fighting the stigma attached to HIV-positive people amounts to granting them license to be irresponsible—from which follows the highly stigmatizing implication that HIV-positive people are naturally inclined to be irresponsible. We need only to look at the “logic” of the speculation about Cunanan’s murderous motive to see this stigma in full force. A particularly alarming consequence of this narrative about ten years ago as opposed to now is the fact that desensitizing ourselves to the stigma of homosexuality and AIDS has led to the tendency of gay journalists themselves to stigmatize HIV-positive gay men, something that, with the notable exception of Randy Shilts, had not heretofore occurred. Take, for example, the Advocate of July 8, 1997, whose cover carries a picture of Brad Davis and the following text: “Sex, drugs, & bathhouses are back. . . . A new bio of gay icon Brad Davis reminds us of the dead end we face,” followed in large type by “Bad Brad.” Inside, under the rubric “The Return of Our Bad Habits,” are three stories: “Men Behaving Badly,” a distillation of Signorile’s screed against the gay party circuit in his book Life Outside; “Slipping Up,” an article about the return of unsafe sex; and “Our Man Brad,” an indictment of Davis’s “lifestyle” and gay men’s supposed emulation of it.9 Ostensibly a preview of Susan Bluestein Davis’s biography of her late husband, this story is in fact a malicious portrait of Davis as a drug-taking, promiscuous hustler. A pull-out quote on the first page reads, “Since his excesses killed him, why are we still hooked on his tragic glamour?” And the story turns to the reigning authority for the cautionary note it is hammering home: “If Davis represents anything for gay men today, Signorile says, it should be a warning about the perils of excess.” There is no attempt to understand and sympathize with Davis’s life or to mourn his tragic death from AIDS. As the religious Right would say, he got what he deserved. Signorile was at it again in his July 1997 column for Out magazine, “Bareback and Reckless.”10 Puffed up with moral indignation, Signorile seems to

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have entirely forgotten his own “carefree nature,” as he now feigns utter incomprehension that there could be “a significant number” of gay men “willfully and sometimes angrily defying safer sex efforts, rebelling against the rest of us, and thereby keeping HIV transmission thriving, affecting adversely the entire gay world.” Signorile does not target positive men specifically here, although he singles out Poz magazine, “which” he writes, “sometimes seems to eerily glamorize AIDS.” Rather, the divide Signorile now enforces is that between the responsible and the irresponsible. This divide is everywhere present in moralistic attacks by the new gay journalists on gay men’s sexual desires, behaviors, and public sexual spaces. Larry Kramer has a long and ignominious history of these attacks, and in 1997 he outdid even himself. In a barely coherent article billed on the cover of the Advocate as “AIDS: We Asked for It” and retitled inside “Sex and Sensibility,” Kramer lambastes Edmund White for writing so much and so explicitly about sex in his novel The Farewell Symphony, excoriates any gay person who has the temerity to question the desirability of gay marriage, and ultimately concurs with Patrick Buchanan from the early days of AIDS: “We brought AIDS upon ourselves by a way of living that welcomed it. You cannot fuck indiscriminately with multiple partners, who are also doing the same, without spreading disease, a disease that has for many years also carried death. Nature always extracts a price for promiscuity.”11 Andrew Sullivan, who wrote a November 1996 cover story for the New York Times Magazine declaring the AIDS epidemic over, has one nagging fear about the new combination therapies that have so miraculously spelled the “plague’s end”: not that they might fail—indeed are failing for many people with AIDS who are not drug-naïve—or that the vast majority of people with HIV infection throughout the world won’t have access to them. Sullivan’s fear is that these new drugs will give gay men the freedom to go back to their bad old promiscuous habits.12 And Gabriel Rotello is especially insistent about the difference between the good gays and the bad. “Indeed,” he writes in his book Sexual Ecology, “the gay world may experience a general cleavage between those who adopt a lifestyle of sexual restraint and those who drift further into acceptance of a homosexuality that is inevitably diseased and death-ridden.”13 These journalists virtually invite a restigmatization of AIDS. “What remains to be seen. . . ,” Rotello writes, “is how sympathetic the great moderate to conservative center of society will be to a social movement many of whose most articulate members seem complacent about risking death on a massive scale, and whose very source of difference—sexuality— is seen as the behavior leading to the problem.”14 An earlier phrasing of this statement in Rotello’s book is more revealing still: “It remains to be seen whether the liberal and moderate allies of gay people will feel com-

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pelled to fight the AIDS battles of the future, or fight them very hard, when the vast majority of sufferers are perceived, even by themselves, to have ‘no excuse.’ ”15 Here is the most chilling divide and the new justification for stigma: men who become positive now—Signorile’s “now” again. The problem “now,” as opposed to “ten years ago,” is revealed to be the difference between those who have an excuse—they didn’t know—and those who have no excuse—they knew. If you slip up now, if you get infected now, it’s your own fault, and what’s more you know it’s your own fault. The ACT UP slogan “All people with AIDS are innocent” no longer holds for you.

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The recent emergence of this small coterie of conservative, openly gay media spokesmen, who virtually monopolize discussion of lesbian and gay issues in the American mainstream media, is one of the contradictory effects of the relative success of struggles for lesbian and gay visibility and rights in the United States. These journalists have achieved and maintained their power—whether naïvely or cynically—by adopting positions on lesbian and gay issues that are commonsensical, simplistic, reductive, and often classically homophobic. Nevertheless, thanks no doubt to the novelty of openly gay men occupying positions of national prominence, they have become minor celebrities even among many lesbians and gay men, winning community service awards, speaking engagements, and lucrative publishing contracts with trade publishers for books aimed at a gay market. They dominate discussion in the lesbian and gay press as well, which has, during this same conjuncture, mainstreamed itself as just one more variant of consumer lifestyle journalism. Whereas formerly the lesbian and gay press— usually local, financially insecure, and politically engaged—played a central role in constructing community and solidarity through fostering open discussion among a wide range of voices, the current gay media seek to deliver a privileged segment of self-identified gay people to product advertisers. Their means are no different from those of the American media more generally: they focus on celebrity, fashion, and entertainment. Anything truly vital about queer life and subcultural expression is considered too marginal for the magazines’ imagined readers. Politics is equally off-limits, except a narrowly defined politics of assimilation, on the one hand, and, on the other, a politics of manufactured controversy, highly sensationalized to bolster circulation. Meanwhile, another, also contradictory, result of our struggle for rights has been the recent flourishing within the academy and academic publishing of radical queer theory—contradictory in this case because queer theory generally calls into question the idea of stable, coherent lesbian and gay identities that formed the basis of our earlier politics. Although queer

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theory thus represents a break with earlier lesbian and gay studies, and although it is far from homogeneous in its complex arguments about identity and difference, one aspect of this work is quite univocal and continuous with earlier scholarship: it can be defined, fundamentally, as antihomophobic. Indeed, queer theory is if anything more concerned with and more sophisticated about the operations of homophobia, or what is sometimes called heteronormativity, than lesbian and gay studies or gay liberation politics were. The vitality of queer theory cannot, however, be counted an unqualified success. Its place in the academy is still hotly contested and structurally weak, and all academic intellectual work in the United States is relegated to the margins of mainstream discussion and is still further marginalized today after more than a decade of relentless right-wing attacks on the academy, which the liberal media have been all too happy to participate in.16 The gay lifestyle media have contributed to the marginalization, too, scoffing at queer theory whenever they bother to notice it at all. The now canonical texts of queer theory within the U.S. academy—among them Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, Lee Edelman’s Homographesis, Diana Fuss’s Inside/Out, David Halperin’s One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Saint Foucault, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet and Tendencies, and Michael Warner’s Fear of a Queer Planet—have rarely been reviewed by, nor have they influenced the arguments and positions articulated in, the gay lifestyle media. What is given generous attention instead are books by gay celebrity journalists: Bruce Bower’s A Place at the Table and Beyond Queer, Gabriel Rotello’s Sexual Ecology, Michelangelo Signorile’s Life Outside: The Signorile Report on Gay Men: Sex, Drugs, Muscles, and the Passages of Life, and Andrew Sullivan’s Virtually Normal and Gay Marriage: Pro and Con. If, following Michel Foucault, a central tenet of queer theory has been an analysis of, and resistance to, normalizing technologies of power, the central precept of these journalists has been acceptance of normalization and vilification of anyone whose way of life might challenge an uncritical compliance with institutionalized norms. The journalists repudiate the legacies of gay liberation, whether militant, democratic activism, resistance to state regulation of sex, or the creation of a vibrant alternative culture; they portray women, including lesbians, as existing to moderate male sexual behavior as a function of their biology; they argue that gay marriage will be a panacea for everything from AIDS to access to any other rights we could reasonably expect (Andrew Sullivan has famously written, “Following legalization of same-sex marriage and a couple of other things, I think we should have a party and close down the gay rights movement for good”);17 they even extol what Signorile calls, with no qualms whatever, “small-town American values.”18 As Michael Warner wrote, “For them, the legitimate

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outcome of a politics of sexuality is a happy lesbian or gay identity in a normal, private home—mature, secure, and demure.”19 This is not a productive intellectual debate; in fact, it is no debate at all. Queer theorists rarely address the mainstream writers or attempt to write for mainstream publications, and the journalists only sneer at queer theory, without having understood—or probably even read—a word of it. The dangerous consequences of this failure of engagement extend well beyond intellectual discussion.

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In the summer of 1997—the summer of Andrew Cunanan’s murder spree—a group of us in New York City attempted to intervene in this situation. We came together over a number of interrelated concerns: the threat to HIV prevention posed by Gabriel Rotello’s claim that safe sex has been a failure and his contention, agreed upon by his fellow journalists, that monogamy and marriage are the only way to end the AIDS epidemic; the harassment and shutting down of public sexual culture as a result of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s so-called Quality of Life Campaign; the exclusion of lesbians from media discussion and the portrayal of lesbian sexuality as properly private, domestic, and monogamous; and, finally, the exclusion from mainstream and gay media discussion of anyone but this select group of conservative gay writers. We called ourselves Sex Panic!, ironically, to call attention to the fact that we felt we were in the middle of one. Within a few months of our first meeting, we held two successful community teachins, got a number of pieces published in the media, and sparked an outcry throughout the gay press. Attention to Sex Panic! culminated the following November in a front-page Sunday Week-in-Review article in the New York Times, revealingly titled “Gay Culture Weighs Sense and Sexuality” and illustrated with a pair of photographs, one showing two smiling, confetticovered men at their gay wedding ceremony, the other, two faceless male bodies in the dark corridor of a sex club.20 Perhaps the most painful lesson we learned in our brief existence was just how difficult it is to get the media to hear our side of the story. The media construction of the issues is spelled out in the New York Times title: on the one side is “sense,” a group of gay journalists trying to stop the continuing spread of HIV by getting gay men to adopt normal, responsible behaviors, while on the other side is “sexuality,” Sex Panic! fighting for gay men to be as promiscuous as they want to be. One journalistic account, albeit written by a young academic who claimed to be a queer theory groupie, encapsulated the media’s reductive version of the debate: “These disagreements pit the value of gay male promiscuity against the dangers of HIV transmission.”21 Sex Panic!’s positions were allowed a quoted sentence here and there, lifted out of context and made to conform to the prede-

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termined framing of the issues. And frankly, none of us in Sex Panic! was particularly adept, when speaking to the media, at sticking to basic points, hammering them home, and guarding against saying something that might easily be misconstrued when reduced to a sound bite. Our insistence that the issues were complex was taken as dangerous relativism or prevarication—failure to take an ethical position in life-and-death circumstances. The celebrity gay journalists, by contrast, are very practiced at speaking the media’s language and readily resort to demagoguery; moreover, their insider status gives them easy access. As the novelist Christopher Bram said of Larry Kramer, “He likes to call himself a voice crying in the wilderness, but his wilderness is the op-ed page of the New York Times.” And indeed Larry Kramer went right to the Times op-ed page with a piece attacking Sex Panic! Here is part of what he wrote: The facts: a small and vocal gay group that calls itself Sex Panic has taken it upon itself to demand “sexual freedom,” which its members define as allowing gay men to have sex when and where and how they want to. In other words, this group is an advocate of unsafe sex, if this is what is wanted, and of public sex, if this is what is wanted. It advocates unconditional, unlimited promiscuity. The facts: public sex means sex in parks, in public restrooms, in bathhouses, in the back rooms of bars and discos, at weekend parties, on beaches—anywhere men can gather. . . . (A question: why is public sex a civil right? I do not want to see straight people copulating in the park or in public restrooms. And I do not believe that heterosexuals view such acts as theirs by right.) The truth is, most gay men live calm, orderly lives, often as couples, and they are embarrassed by what Sex Panic espouses. They are ashamed this issue has surfaced again. . . . Without a strong, vocal opposition, Sex Panic is on the way to convincing much of America that all gay men are back to pre-AIDS self-destructive behavior that will wind up costing the taxpayer a lot of extra money. Indeed, what Sex Panic is demanding could easily allow our enemies, as well as many of our straight friends, to deny all gay people what rights we’ve won or are still fighting for.22

The day this column appeared, an e-mail went out to members of Sex Panic! asking for letters to be written to set the record straight, and many provided them. The following day, five letters were printed under the headline “Defenders of Promiscuity Set Back AIDS Fight.” Not one was by a member of Sex Panic!, and not one disagreed with Kramer’s position. Three days later, three more letters appeared, this time opposing Kramer. Published under the rubric “In Debate, Gay Men Aim to Find Middle Path,” one letter came from Berkeley professor and queer theorist Leo Bersani. Bersani confidently refuted the most damaging of Kramer’s assertions—that “gay men

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created a culture that in effect murdered us”—but ended his letter with the following question: “Is it possible for gay men to have a debate that is not defined by self-destructiveness on the one side and, on the other, a hysterical aversion to sexual pleasure?”23 This sounds like a commonsense question—and that is precisely the problem. What is this selfdestructiveness? Bersani refers to “a small number of gay men” who “suggest that unsafe sex is fine.” It is not clear that Bersani attributes this opinion to Sex Panic!, but he makes no attempt to distinguish it from Sex Panic!’s position. This is, I think, a telling example of the perils of speaking about such complex issues to the mainstream media. Although it is true that a few gay writers have provocatively celebrated the pleasures of unsafe sex, sometimes without providing the necessary context to make their celebrations comprehensible,24 the current debate can be seen as defined by such provocations only if they are conflated with attempts to understand why gay men have unsafe sex and to explain why simple condemnation of unsafe behavior will not help. In a number of important theoretical texts—primarily The Freudian Body and “Is the Rectum a Grave?”—Bersani, following the psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche, has made the argument that sex is constitutively masochistic because it brings about a shattering of the self.25 Sex provides “pleasure in giving up what our civilization insists that we retain—our ego boundaries.”26 But where the masculine (heterosexual) psychic position is characterized by a “paranoid defensiveness” against this fundamental, self-shattering masochism, the result is a “hyperbolically defended and armored” ego, “willing to kill in order to protect the seriousness of [its] statements.”27 Gay male sex represents, by contrast, the radical potential of the ego’s continual deflation leading to self-extensibility. The final sentence of Bersani’s famous essay “Is the Rectum a Grave?” reads: “Male homosexuality advertises the risk of the sexual itself as the risk of self-dismissal, of losing sight of the self, and in so doing it proposes and dangerously represents jouissance as a mode of ascesis.”28 (It should be emphasized that Bersani privileges gay male sex only insofar as it is understood as a heuristic category for rethinking the relations of psychic and social life.) Now, whether or not we agree with Bersani’s sexual theories, I think we can certainly agree that Bersani’s resorting to a pop-psychology notion of “self-destructiveness” to describe one side of the current debates about gay male sexuality thoroughly contradicts his own theoretical propositions— propositions that hinge precisely on the self-destroying potential of sex. To adopt a seemingly reasonable position, to “find a middle path” in the words of the New York Times, may be a strong temptation when writing for the mainstream media, but when your entire intellectual project is devoted to celebrating sex as a radical force opposed to self-contained mastery, a jouissance beyond sense, it is an act of extraordinary intellectual self-betrayal.

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Bersani’s self-betrayal points to what is missing from media debates about gay sex, that is, any genuinely theoretical understanding of what sex is, of the deeply disruptive, anticivilizing psychic force of sex. The mainstream media and conservative gay journalists alike treat sex as a simple behavior, obedient to will and reason, as if it were no different from, say, driving a car. When driving, there are rules and regulations and courtesies that any responsible person will follow in order to remain safe and help ensure the safety of others on the road. Although there are many uncivilized drivers, to be a civilized driver does not require overcoming insurmountable psychic conflict. Sex, however, represents nothing but conflict in relation to civilizing impulses. Why, then, do gay men have unsafe sex, and how do we talk to the media about it? Certainly the vast majority of gay men who have unsafe sex are still those who have not been given the information and support that would help them protect themselves. Federally funded, sexually explicit HIV education targeted directly at gay men is still effectively curtailed in the United States by so-called community-standards regulations.29 Young men in particular, and especially young men of color, very rarely have access to homosexually specific HIV education at the time they begin sexual experimentation. They are, not surprisingly, statistically the most vulnerable to HIV transmission. Because this is not what the current debates focus on, these young men are rendered all the more invisible and vulnerable. At issue instead, in the current furor over unsafe sex, are those of us who have been well exposed to HIV prevention education, who know the risks of unsafe sex, and who still, at least occasionally, have unsafe sex. Why do we do it? I have a simple answer: We are human. When I say this—that we have unsafe sex because we are human—what I mean is something like what Bersani intends when he theorizes sex as constitutively masochistic, potentially ego-shattering, opposed to self-mastery. But how to put this to, say, the New York Times? As an exercise—an exercise, it turned out, in futility—I decided to see how I might write about this issue for the Times. So here is a piece I submitted to the op-ed editor shortly after Larry Kramer’s piece on Sex Panic! appeared.

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Why do gay men continue to have unsafe sex, knowing how dangerous the consequences can be? Many voices in the media, prominent gay journalists among them, tell us it’s because we are self-destructive or just plain fools. But hectoring won’t help anyone practice safe sex. HIV prevention is, unfortunately, not a simple matter; if we pretend it is, the result could be more, not fewer, infections. Exhorting gay men to just grow up and be responsible ignores how powerful and charged with conflict sex is for every-

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one. Imagine then how much more conflicted it must be for gay men living in the midst of the AIDS epidemic. In a society that shows its disapproval of gay sex in countless ways—messages we all receive from infancy to adulthood—gay men’s most basic, life-sustaining desires and pleasures become especially fraught. Add to this the fact that each of our sexual encounters might lead to the transmission of a deadly virus, and you might begin to understand the distress that so many of us have endured for the better part of two decades. During this time, the majority of gay men have practiced safe sex most of the time, and untold numbers of lives have been saved. Anyone who thinks this has been easy should think again. The assumption that using a condom every time you have intercourse—every time, no exceptions—is just plain good sense disregards all the powerful drives and emotions that can get in the way of “good sense” during sex: the need to express feelings of trust and intimacy, the desire to live in the moment, to overcome shame, to break the rules. Every one of us feels these emotions, simply because we are human. To suggest that gay men should not feel them, or should put them aside for the rest of our lives, is to deny us our humanity. If discussions of gay sexual behavior were to begin by acknowledging the extraordinary difficulties gay men have lived with, both before and during the epidemic, and how bravely and ethically most of us have lived with these difficulties, I doubt anyone would be so quick to label our behavior selfdestructive. Indeed, the opposite is the case. Gay men’s behavior throughout the AIDS epidemic has been profoundly self-protective. In our struggle to protect our lives, many of us have also fought to preserve the publicly accessible sexual culture that has nurtured us, provided a sense of community, solidarity, and well-being—given us, in fact, the courage and will to save ourselves. Where did we learn about safe sex? From the government? In school? Of course not. We learned about safe sex in our own community, from each other, in bars, bathhouses, and sex clubs. But first, of course, we had to invent safe sex. When others characterize gay sexual culture as destructive, as having caused AIDS in the first place, is it any wonder that we protest? As a member of the activist group Sex Panic!, which came together over concerns about continuing high rates of HIV infection, I don’t demand unconditional sexual freedom. Rather, I ask that the rich, distinctive social world gay people have worked so painstakingly to build be honored and supported—not because it is perfect, but because without it we have only the isolation, alienation, and abjection that so many in this society would impose on us. If always practicing safe sex is difficult for us to sustain now, how much more difficult would it become if we had no public community support? The current push for economic privatization and the ceding of urban space to private entities shielded from public accountability find a coun-

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terpart in the vilification of public gay culture, whether what is opposed are bars and nightclubs, political activism, or just “flaunting it in public.” But those who call for a complete reconstruction of gay culture seem to forget that the social norms they consider responsible and civilized are the very norms that have always stigmatized and shunned us and against which we had to find an alternative. Why should we adopt them now? Why should we abandon the life-affirming and pleasure-filled world that we have created, where we have learned genuine responsibility to one another, for a world that only grudgingly tolerates us? Whether or not it is important for gay people to gain the right to marry—and this is far from agreed upon among gay people—it is dangerous to assume that marriage would make us safe from AIDS. Studies showing that fewer than half of heterosexual couples with one HIV-positive partner consistently practice safe sex suggest otherwise. This is not a debate between so-called ordinary homosexuals and a marginal group of sex radicals. Nor is it a debate about monogamy versus promiscuity. These false oppositions denigrate the culture all gay people have made. Unlike other oppressed groups, we gay people do not acquire our culture as a birthright. We have to create it after we find our way out of the hostile environments we grow up in, often including our own families. Among our greatest achievements are the diverse possibilities we have invented for the expression and fulfillment of affectional and sexual relations. These possibilities are a function of our public world, overlapping communities of interest and desire, where we find each other and learn to care about each other. When that public realm shrinks—when the city closes down our bars and clubs for cabaret license violations and other trumped-up charges—we lose much more than places for sex. We lose the places where our lives have taken on social meaning and made it possible for us to overcome the atomized, private, and often secret identities that most of us lived with before finding others like ourselves. Anyone who truly cares about slowing the HIV infection rate in gay men might begin by learning more about how we’ve survived thus far—against overwhelming odds. Maybe then we’ll get some of the genuine support we need in our efforts to maintain the safe sexual behavior we have worked so hard to practice all along. And it might help to remember when some of us fail: we too are human.30

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An HIV-prevention leader and personal friend of mine asked, in a news story about AIDS, “Am I the only one tormented with nagging curiosity, anxiety, and doubts when I learn that another friend has seroconverted?” I knew whom he was tormented about. He was tormented about me. He never said this directly to me, but his indirection has been easy to read.

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Here is what I think his curiosity, anxiety, and doubt are about: He knows me from the time we were fellow members of ACT UP in the late 1980s. He knows that I am one of the lucky ones, someone who was sexually very active in New York City during the 1970s and early 1980s who nevertheless remained HIV-negative. He knows that I have written, taught, and lectured extensively about AIDS. He knows that I began practicing safe sex in the mid-1980s and that I understand the risks of unsafe sex. He and I have had many discussions about prevention and particularly about how new prevention strategies can be developed that take account of the difficulties of maintaining safe-sex practices over the long term, in the face of powerful fantasies of unsafe sex and transgression, of growing despair and survivor’s guilt, of the fact that sex is not amenable to rational will. Knowing all this, what he is really curious to ask is, How can you—you of all people—have seroconverted? His anxiety and his doubt follow that question with another: If you can seroconvert, is it possible that I too could seroconvert? Or my boyfriend? My other negative friends? Is anyone safe? My answer again is simple, and it is the same answer. I seroconverted because I, too, am human. And no, no one is safe, not you, your boyfriend, or any of your negative friends. Because you and they are human too. My only disappointment in all this is that I should have to protest my humanity to a friend. Still, I understand it, for to accept my humanity is to accept my frailty. Or to put it differently, it is to accept that I have an unconscious. It is to accept that everything I experienced, everything I knew, everything I understood could not guarantee my safety. Perhaps my motive for writing an op-ed piece to the Times now appears in a different light. But I want to protest that it is not written only in selfdefense. It is written against the fantasy of absolute safety. For this is, I think, the most dangerous thing of all about the renewed moralizing about having unsafe sex and becoming infected now. The moralizing is, in fact, a psychic defense. If we tell ourselves that only irresponsible fools still expose themselves to HIV, we allow ourselves to imagine that we are safe, since few of us would say of ourselves that we are irresponsible fools. Even if we did, we would very likely still think it possible to stop being an irresponsible fool—and then we’d be safe. But if even the educated, rational, and responsible among us can become infected with HIV, if AIDS activists and prevention educators can seroconvert now, then we have to think differently, with still greater complexity and self-understanding, about protection. We have to think about the force of our own unconscious, of our terrible vulnerability, of the fact that we, too, are human. And we have to accept the possibility, even the inevitability, that some of us will fail. How might queer theory help us do this? How does saying that we are human differ from the conservative journalists’ traditional humanist view that we are no different from anyone else save for whom we choose to love?

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The answer to this question is as complicated and disputed as all the works of queer theory occupying the shelves of our university libraries. But I will attempt to shorten the answer to a few sentences. Queer theory, like much recent postmodern theory, tells us that humanity is not a universal and natural condition of being but a contingent and cultural construction of historical, social, linguistic, and psychic forces. Knowing this, queer theory also knows the political urgency of understanding how and why we are denied our humanity within and through those very forces. The abjection of homosexuality is not a simple matter of ignorance to be overcome with time, education, and “progress,” but a deep-seated psychic mechanism central to the construction of normative subjectivity and thus of social cohesion. Armored with this understanding, we can protect against sacrificing our humanity in the very act of struggling to get it recognized or purchasing it at the cost of another’s humanity, which is the perilous ethical cost of accepting the regimes of the normal. What queer theory has yet to learn is no less urgent: How do we make what we know knowable to legions? NOTES

1. The S&M-serial murder connection was most belabored by Maureen Orth, “The Killer’s Trail,” Vanity Fair, September 1997, 268–75, 329–36. 2. See Joel Achenbach, “The Killer Virus Motive: Unfounded Rumor Casts HIV as a Villain in Slaying,” Washington Post, July 19, 1997, F1. 3. Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), 165. 4. Quoted in Douglas Crimp, “Randy Shilts’s Miserable Failure,” in A Queer World: The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Martin Duberman (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 643. 5. Michelangelo Signorile, “H.I.V.-Positive, and Careless,” New York Times, February 26, 1995, E15. 6. See Walt Odets, In the Shadow of the Epidemic: Being HIV-Negative in the Age of AIDS (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995). 7. Michelangelo Signorile, “Negative Pride,” Out 20 (March 1995), 24. 8. Signorile, “H.I.V.-Positive, and Careless.” 9. David Heitz, “Men Behaving Badly”; John Gallagher, “Slipping Up”; Robert L. Pela, “Our Man Brad,” Advocate 737 (July 8, 1997): 26–38. 10. Michelangelo Signorile, “Bareback and Reckless,” Out 45 (July 1997): 36– 39. 11. Larry Kramer, “Sex and Sensibility,” Advocate 734 (May 27, 1997): 59. 12. Andrew Sullivan, “When Plagues End: Notes on the Twilight of an Epidemic,” New York Times Magazine, November 10, 1996, 52–62, 76–77, 84. For an important critique of the racist presumptions of Sullivan’s article, see Phillip Brian Harper, Private Affairs: Critical Ventures in the Culture of Social Relations (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 89–124. 13. Gabriel Rotello, Sexual Ecology: AIDS and the Destiny of Gay Men (New York: Dutton, 1997), 287.

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14. Rotello, Sexual Ecology, 284. 15. Rotello, Sexual Ecology, 280. 16. For two particularly scurrilous examples, see Lee Siegel, “The Gay Science,” New Republic, November 9, 1998, 30–42; and Martha C. Nussbaum, “The Professor of Parody,” New Republic, February 22, 1999, 37–45. 17. Quoted in Out Facts: Just about Everything You Need to Know about Gay and Lesbian Life, ed. David Groff (New York: Universe, 1997). 18. Michelangelo Signorile, Life Outside: The Signorile Report on Gay Men: Sex, Drugs, Muscles, and the Passages of Life (New York: HarperCollins, 1997); see especially chapter 5, “The Deurbanization of Homosexuality,” 181–207. 19. Michael Warner, “Media Gays: A New Stone Wall,” Nation, July 14, 1997, 15. 20. Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “Gay Culture Weighs Sense and Sexuality,” New York Times, November 23, 1997, section 4, pp. 1, 6. 21. Caleb Crain, “Pleasure Principles: Queer Theorists and Gay Journalists Wrestle over the Politics of Sex,” Lingua Franca, October 1997, 28. 22. Larry Kramer, “Gay Culture, Redefined,” New York Times, December 12, 1997, A23. 23. Leo Bersani, “Homophobia Redux,” New York Times, December 16, 1997, A30. 24. Most famous among the provocateurs is porn star and writer Scott O’Hara, who founded the queer sex zine Steam in 1993. See Scott O’Hara, Autopornograhy: A Memoir of Life in the Lust Lane (New York: Harrington Park, 1997). 25. Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986); Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” in AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism, ed. Douglas Crimp (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), 197–222. See also Tim Dean, Hal Foster, and Kaja Silverman, “A Conversation with Leo Bersani,” October 82 (fall 1997): 3–16. 26. Quoted in Dean et al., “Conversation with Leo Bersani,” 7. 27. Bersani, quoted in Dean et al., “Conversation with Leo Bersani,” 8; and Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” 222. 28. Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” 222, emphasis in original. 29. On this subject, see Cindy Patton, Fatal Advice: How Safe-Sex Education Went Wrong (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996). 30. This opinion piece was submitted to Katherine Roberts, op-ed page editor of the New York Times, on January 26, 1998; the newspaper indicated no interest in publishing it.

II

Spatial Remains

David Lloyd

The Memory of Hunger Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious. walter benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”

Sinead O’Connor’s controversial rap mix “Famine” opens with the uncanny sound of a dog howling. The sound is uncanny for several reasons: it is impossible to tell in this context if the howl is of hunger, grief, or some condensation of the two; it is difficult to determine whether the sound we hear is actually a dog’s howl or a human imitation of the sound, a difficulty that in itself opens the uncanny domain where the human and the natural converge and mimic one another. This animal lament accentuates the absence or the silence of what properly should be the sound of human mourning; it is as if the field of human society itself has been decimated to the extent that all that remains of its domestic and affective fabric, for which the memory of the dead is an indispensable thread, is this anguish of the domestic animal on the verge of reverting to its wildness. “Mouths biting the empty air,” these sounds of dogs howling insist disturbingly on the questions: What issues from the empty mouth? What speech follows the horrors of famine? What mourning can work through the memory of mass destruction? These are of course the themes that Sinead O’Connor pursues, insisting on the repression of the memory of the Famine in subsequent Irish culture, connecting this with our deeply embedded habit of disavowing the personal and cultural damage that is in part the legacy of our colonial past and demanding that we learn to grieve in order to heal. In relation to this demand, her stated understanding of herself as a contemporary “keener” is entirely apposite and is a motif that we will return to later. But the uncanniness of the dog’s howl lies not only in its immediate effects on the hearer. For if the sound is quite literally haunting, that is surely because it picks up and foregrounds a whole chain of representations of the Famine and its psychological effects that recur through virtually every account, jour205

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nalistic, historical, and fictional. In account after account of the Famine, the terrible silence of the land is time and again counterpointed by the sound of wailing or howling, as if indifferently human or animal. The silence is at once the silence of depopulation and the silence of traumatized culture; the wail is the almost animal wail of despair and passivity before a catastrophe that seems to exceed comprehension. Wordless, the wail is also anonymous, without any distinct agency to utter it; as a recurrent motif in representations of the Famine (which is not to say anything yet as to the accuracy of such representations), it marks simultaneously the dissolution of the Irish as subjects of their own culture and history and the historical emergence of a new kind of Irish subject whose elements are in many respects still present and who embodies a peculiar weave of memory, damage, and modernity. The sense of shock at a catastrophe epochal in its implications is clear in a celebrated account of the Famine’s effects written in its immediate aftermath: The “land of song” was no longer tuneful; or, if a human sound met the traveller’s ear, it was only that of the feeble and despairing wail for the dead. This awful, unwonted silence, which, during the famine and subsequent years, almost everywhere prevailed, struck more fearfully upon their imaginations, as many Irish gentlemen informed me, and gave them a deeper feeling of the desolation with which the country had been visited, than any other circumstance which had forced itself upon their attention. . . . 1

Almost a century later, in what is probably the most complex and interesting historical novel on the Famine, Liam O’Flaherty picks up the powerful acoustic image of wailing in his description of the advent of the blight and with the same sense of its vocalizing of despair and passivity: Towards the north, in the direction towards which Thomsy pointed, Mary and the old man saw people looking over fences, just as they themselves were doing. The people had begun to wail. In this wailing there was a note of utter despair. There was no anger in it, no power, not even an appeal for mercy. It was just like the death groan of a mortally wounded person, groaning in horror of inevitable death. “It’s the blight,” Mary whispered. “Oh! God in Heaven!” . . . Mary turned away from the fence as he approached. She began to walk back to the house. The wailing was now general all over the Valley.2

In a more recent account that draws on contemporary testimony, Thomas Gallagher produces a no less graphic account of the anguished response to the blight: Unlike the previous year, when large areas in both the north and south were unaffected, the blight this time spread to every area in so short a time that a

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kind of wailing lament rose throughout the country wherever neighbors gathered. Those with tin cans of holy water flicked it into their faces, wet their fingers and made the sign of the cross, prayed and genuflected as though before an altar. Keeners at a wake could not have sent up more varieties of anguish and despair than did these Irish families at the sight of their entire year’s food supply being destroyed.3

Examples of the recurrence of the motif of wailing and its relation to the passivity of the afflicted Irish peasantry could be multiplied indefinitely and with a regularity that suggests that we are concerned here not merely with dramatic effect but with a discourse that constitutes the very meaning of the Famine as a cultural rather than a natural phenomenon. Nor is that constitution of the Famine’s meaning in any simple way a retrospective construction; the condensation of wailing and passivity was clearly quite automatic for contemporary observers and embedded in the most immediate representations of the catastrophe. Among the most powerful of such observers was William Carleton, not least on account of his intimacy with the peasant culture from which he had emerged. His 1847 novel, The Black Prophet, was written explicitly to alert an English reading public to the horrors of starvation and accordingly records the Famine’s effects in painstaking detail: In all these acts of violence [the food riots that occasionally broke out] there was very little shouting; the fact being, that the wretched people were not able to shout, unless on rare occasions; and sooth to say, their vociferations were then but a faint and feeble echo of the noisy tumults which in general characterize the proceedings of excited and angry crowds. . . . The ghastly impressions of famine, however, were not confined to those who composed the crowds. Even the children were little living skeletons, wan and yellow, with a spirit of pain and suffering legible upon their fleshless but innocent features; whilst the very dogs, as was well observed, were not able to bark, for, indeed, such of them as survived, were nothing but ribs and skin. At all events, they assisted in making up the terrible picture of general misery which the country at large presented. Both day and night, but at night especially, their hungry howlings could be heard over the country, or mingling with the wailings which the people were in the habit of pouring over those whom the terrible typhus was sweeping away with such wide and indiscriminating fatality.4

The destination of Carleton’s novel does something to explain the emphasis of his representations of the starving people, which undercut the rage that was often expressed in popular attempts to halt the daily export of foodstuffs from the country throughout the Famine years. In order to capture the sympathy of a British public, accustomed, in relation both to their own long-standing stereotypes of the Irish as violent and to the actual social unrest of the tithe wars of the 1830s, to view the Irish as threatening and seditious, Carleton seeks to minimize the anger and resistance among the

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poor and, throughout the novel, represents the Ribbonmen as a minority of misguided agitators. Unlike O’Flaherty, who provides a sympathetic narrative of resistance in Famine, Carleton emphasizes the passivity and patience of the population. In such a context, the “wailing” of the Irish becomes the sign of their helplessness in the face of the “fatality” of the Famine. But the association of the Irish with wailing is not new; it is at once continuous with and, in the context of Famine narratives, transformative of one of the most perdurable topoi of pre-Famine English representations of Ireland’s cultural peculiarities, “keening.” Scarcely an English traveler’s account of Irish social customs fails to discourse on the singularity of this practice, and in the period immediately prior to the Famine, when Ireland had become both a principal locus of post-Romantic tourism and a major site of political concern for the British Empire, keening became a crucial index for an emergent ethnographic discourse on the Irish national character. As a phenomenon through which the strangeness of Irish customs and values is articulated, keening focuses a profoundly ambivalent matrix of responses to pre-Famine Irish culture, at once fixing that culture in its primitive incivility and giving rise to disturbance and uncertainty. Reading the discourse on keening carefully not only situates within a deeper history the association of the Famine and wailing but also contributes to our understanding of the ongoing cultural transformation within which the Famine was a critical watershed. In addition, it helps to specify the racial attitudes that underlay the administrative callousness of British responses to the Famine. Mrs. S. C. Hall’s description of a not uncommon scene of annual hardship and shortage in West Cork around 1840 indicates that the relationship between hunger and keening was already established before the Famine: At Bandon we beheld a melancholy scene—several carts returning to their homes in the country, which they had quitted in the morning with money to procure food, but compelled to go back without it. Women and children accompanied them with loud cries; literally “keening,” as if they were following a corpse to its place of rest.5

Generally, however, prior to the Famine, keening is recognized as a practice specifically related to mourning for the dead, which is why it becomes the focus for discourse on the strangeness and dangers of Irish emotion. Descriptions of the practice by English writers hesitate between the recognition of its professional and often formulaic nature and its appropriation as a sign of Irish subjection to and indulgence of violent and unpredictable emotion. That emotion in turn becomes the index of Irish political and cultural instability. Another account by Mrs. Hall, this time of a funeral or

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wake in Kerry, begins by acknowledging the organized and ritual nature of the practice: The women of the household range themselves at either side [of the corpse], and the keen (caoine) at once commences. They rise with one accord, and, moving their bodies with a slow motion to and fro, their arms apart, they continue to keep up a heart-rending cry. This cry is interrupted for a while to give the ban caionthe (the leading keener) an opportunity of commencing. At the close of every stanza of the dirge, the cry is repeated, to fill up, as it were, the pause, and then dropped; the woman then again proceeds with the dirge, and so on to the close.6

For many observers of the keen, part of the difficulty of comprehending it lies in the apparent contradiction between its wild extemporaneity and its formulaic aspects, or, to put it otherwise, the difficulty lies in comprehending the performance of emotion. The sinister connotations of keening that such difficulties give rise to are often condensed with the fact that the professional keener generally was—or appeared to be—an old woman: “The keener is almost invariably an aged woman; or if she be comparatively young, the habits of her life make her look old.”7 In Thomas Crofton Croker’s account “Keens and Death Ceremonies,” the uncertainty that attaches to the figure of the keener attains a peculiar intensity that is inseparable from a larger unsettlement as to the political significance of Irish cultural practices. In this description of the funeral procession for a member of an old Gaelic family, Croker oscillates between an understanding of her expression as spontaneous, “dictated” by grief and therefore one with the natural sublimity of the scenery, and the acknowledgment of the professional status of the keener: The vast multitude, winding through some romantic defile, or trailing along the base of a wild mountain, while the chorus of the death-song, coming fitfully upon the breeze, is raised by a thousand voices. On a closer view, the aged nurse is seen sitting on the hearse beside the coffin, with her body bent over it; her actions dictated by the most violent grief, and her head completely enveloped in the deep hood of her large cloak, which falls in broad and heavy folds, producing altogether a most mysterious and awful figure. . . . The Irish funeral howl is notorious, and although this vociferous expression of grief is on the decline, there is still, in the less civilized parts of the country, a strong attachment to the custom, and many may yet be found who are keeners or mourners for the dead by profession.8

The mystery of what lies beneath the voluminous cloak, the impenetrability of this quasi-supernatural figure who seems at once decrepit and powerful, rapidly becomes the allegory for the secret circulation of sedition for which both the keen and its language become the “cloak”:

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Keens are also a medium through which the disaffected circulate their mischievous principles, and this they do without much attempt at concealment, the Irish language being a sufficient cloak for the expression of seditious sentiments. . . . 9

What I would want to suggest, however, is that it is less the concealed content of the keen that gives rise to disturbance than the form itself as a striking instance of Irish cultural difference from the English. It is not simply the seditious sense of Irish sentiments that is at stake but the nature of Irish “sentiment” itself, which is so deeply recalcitrant to Anglicization. It is well known that Irish emotional or sentimental characteristics were subjected to a considerable labor of investigation and interpretation in the course of the nineteenth century. This labor is continuous in many respects with the long-standing English discourse on Irish violence and incivility. But it receives added impetus from England’s political difficulties with Ireland after the Union of 1800, particularly in relation to the desire to integrate Ireland politically and economically into the empire and is, further, formalized by the emergent science of ethnography and its inquiries into national and racial character. The political and ethnographic impulses are synthesized in Matthew Arnold’s On the Study of Celtic Literature, which, appearing twenty years after the Famine, gave canonical expression to the idea of the “sentimentality” of the Celtic nature and of the relation between Irish culture and grieving.10 Arnold’s work, which draws on other European celticists such as Renan and Martin, can be seen as a critical moment in the long trajectory of a steadily transforming discourse on the Irish emotional economy for which the shift from the performance of grief in the often-seditious keen to the fatalistic wail of the famine-stricken peasantry is one crucial marker. The force of Arnold’s argument is that the alternately feminine, childlike, or turbulent sentimentality of the Celt, which is so ineffectual in political and economic spheres, finds its cultural value only when supplemented and disciplined by Anglo-Saxon steadiness and when taken up into the larger and emerging unity of an English empire. The disposition of the Irish is drawn into the longer narrative of a developing civilization that assimilates cultural difference to itself. This temporal framework seeks to dissipate the anxiety that attaches to the apparent incommensurability of Irish and English cultural forms, while within it the topos of mourning might seem to naturalize the defeat of Irish culture as the expression of an ethnic predisposition.11 In the emergence of this narrative, the shift from keen to wail is doubtless of significance in marking the transition from sedition or outcry to fatalism. At the same time, however, the predominantly temporal framework within which ethnic characteristics are disposed for Arnold is counterpointed by what we might describe as a spatial econ-

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omy with regard to the strangeness of Irish sentimentality. For that sentimentality involves not merely grieving but also transports of joy and especially rapid transitions from one state to the other. The Irish emotional economy is envisaged as the “maniacal” obverse of the “dullness” of the Anglo-Saxon; it is akin to the characteristics that Norbert Elias will discern in the personality of premodern Europeans or, more specifically, to the human emotional disposition prior to the regulation of emotion that emerges with the advent of the centralized political state and its corresponding “civility”: “The personality, if we may put it thus, is incomparably more ready and accustomed to leap with undiminishing intensity from one extreme to the other, and slight impressions, uncontrollable associations are often enough to induce these immense fluctuations.”12 The connection of the emotionally consistent or regulated personality with forms of civility reminds us that in the tradition of representations of Irish character, discourse on the “fluctuations” of Irish emotion embed a system of political and moral judgment within ethnographic description. Accordingly, the proximity of emotional traits that colloquial whimsy designates “the tear and the smile” figures in the emergent ethnographic discourse prior to the Famine as an index of impropriety. Impropriety has reference not simply to the moral codes of bourgeois civility as such, but to the spatiality and the timing of emotional display. It is not just that the performance of emotion is itself an affront to the assumptions of an English observer for whom the authenticity of emotions such as grief is inseparable from its privacy and inwardness, but also that within the economy of Irish emotional expression, the site of grieving is not necessarily separated, either temporally or spatially, from that of “merriment” or pleasure. The famous wake is the recurrent index of this phenomenon. The impropriety of Irish conduct is articulated at once in the fluctuations between emotional states and in the absence of marked distinctions between discrete spaces each of which is “proper” to a certain display of emotion or topic of conversation. Thus Hall’s description of funeral ceremonies, which I began to cite above, continues as follows: During the pauses of the women’s wailing, the men, seated in groups by the fire, or in the corners of the room, are indulging in jokes, exchanging repartees, and bantering each other, some about their sweethearts, and some about their wives, or talking over the affairs of the day—prices and politics, priests and parsons, the all-engrossing subjects of Irish conversation. . . . It is needless to observe, that the merriment is in ill keeping with the solemnity of the death chamber, and that very disgraceful scenes are, or rather were, of frequent occurrence; the whiskey being always abundant, and the men and women nothing loath to partake of it to intoxication.13

Multiple transgressions of the proper disposition of spaces are in evidence here: the boundaries between pleasure and pain, mourning and levity, are

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fluid; what begins as a gendered division of the chamber between wailing women and bantering men clearly dissolves as the women partake equally of the spirits that undermine propriety; and the mouth itself, the privileged site of oral culture, becomes the unstable and indifferent locus of intoxication, laughter, and lament. We will return to this ambiguous territory of the mouth later, noting only how charged this orifice is for the ambivalent representation of Irishness: the site at once of fluent speech and secretive silence, lament and laughter, intoxication and hunger, guile and guilelessness. But the moral censure that attaches to the unsettling contiguity of Irish emotional states is embedded in a historical logic whereby English commentators seek to locate and stabilize their Celtic others in relation to their own sense of cultural and political modernity. Thomas Crofton Croker’s judgment of the Irish character is not untypical: The rough and honest independence of the English cottager speaks the freedom he has so long enjoyed, and when really injured his appeal to the laws for redress and protection marks their impartial and just administration: the witty servility of the Irish peasantry, mingled with occasional bursts of desperation and revenge—the devoted yet visionary patriotism—the romantic sense of honour, and improvident yet unalterable attachments, are evidence of a conquest without system, an irregular government, and the remains of feudal clanship, the barbarous and arbitrary organization of a warlike people.14

This appeal to the constitutional legality that guarantees the English spirit of independence vis-à-vis the “barbarism” and the local and affective attachments of its subject peoples is the staple of British imperial discourse throughout the nineteenth century. What it implies is the necessity for English interventions to bring subject peoples like the Irish to the point where they can become political subjects in a modern sense, capable of self-submission to the regularity of law and of attachment to abstract principles rather than affective ties.15 This political desire on the part of the English is inseparable from an economic judgment as to the moral character of the Irish, which turns on their perceived incapacity for sustained labor (what Arnold will later call the Celt’s lack of “architectonic” capacity). Croker’s comments are again typical: The present Irish character is a compound of strange and apparent inconsistencies, where vices and virtues are so unhappily blended that it is difficult to distinguish or separate them. Hasty in forming opinions and projects, tardy in carrying them into effect, they are often relinquished before they have arrived into maturity, and are abandoned for others as vague and indefinite. . . . The virtues of patience, prudence, and industry seldom are included in the composition of an Irishman: he projects gigantic schemes, but wants per-

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severance to realize any work of magnitude: his conceptions are grand and vivid, but his execution is feeble and indolent: he is witty and imprudent, and will dissipate the hard earnings of to-day regardless of to-morrow: an appeal made to his heart is seldom unsuccessful, and he is generous with an uninquiring and profuse liberality.16

What the Irish lack are precisely the virtues, political and economic, that would permit the development of Ireland into a modern nation. Within English colonial discourse, Ireland’s backwardness can be understood, in terms of an emerging developmental historiography, as deriving from their fixation at an earlier historical stage, that of feudalism, out of which English political modernity has already emerged. Irish society is, at least historically, continuous with England, and only a time lag has to be overcome. It is this lag that English reform is set to make up. Politically, the Irish will be brought from affective attachments to reason by the systematic extension of English law; the Irish incapacity for sustained labor or the virtues of patience, prudence, and industry will be overcome by the discipline of political economy. As is well known, these interlocked projects informed English policy in Ireland, from the attitude to the landlord system to the question of political violence, throughout the nineteenth century. These projects also informed the moral judgments of the Irish held by English administrators during the Famine, with catastrophic effects on efforts to provide relief.17 Thomas Boylan and Timothy Foley have well documented English efforts throughout the nineteenth century to disseminate political economic doctrine as part of a project at once economic and political. Central to this project was the dissemination of popular political economic tracts such as that written by Archbishop Robert Whateley, of Dublin, which sought to use the supposed science of economics to justify the reigning social order. But the drive was not merely to school the Irish; it was also to produce a new kind of subject, “to change what was perceived as Irish ‘character,’ to substitute ordered, rational discourse . . . for rhetorical excess, thereby promoting affection for England and the Established Church.”18 The characteristics of this new political economic subject can be fairly succinctly summarized. Critical was the capacity for sustained productive labor that the Irish were held so singularly to lack. This capacity turned on the emergence of the rationally self-interested individual whose choices and desires invisibly regulate both production and consumption. Such an individual is founded in the ethical virtues of autonomy and consistency; “he” is not swayed by affect or by outside influences but “gives the law to himself” and becomes, accordingly, the reliable economic and political subject. All of these qualities are subsumed in that capacity for “deferred gratification” that is the hallmark of the modern subject whose corporal and psychic orientation is the future rather than the present. That subject is, needless

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to say, the antithesis of the Irishman described so often by Croker and others. This catalog of abstract qualities of the political economic subject at once obscures and reveals the fact that what is at stake is producing not merely a new set of psychic and ethical dispositions, or even a new “social body,” but in a quite immediate sense a new physical economy for the Irish body. The zones of this new body on which Ireland’s possible development is predicated are to be reordered in so deep a way as to transform a body that was the synchronous site of contiguous and shifting affects into a disciplined body that will be the locus of futurity. This involves, along with the many other modes of discipline characteristic of modernity, the attempt to impose a distinctly modern hierarchy of the senses, for which the eye and ear, the most distanced and objectifying of organs, become the privileged vehicles of taste and culture.19 The moral discipline that seeks to transform the shiftlessness of the Irish who are “regardless of to-morrow” into prudence and economy requires the subordination of that most undisciplined of Irish orifices, the mouth. The impropriety of the Irish that was so consistently located in the laxity of their mouths as sites of consumption and rhetoric is to be cured by a new morality that will increasingly target oral culture and alcohol as the inveterate causes and symptoms of Ireland’s backwardness. That the moment of the Famine is generally regarded as that of the final and irrevocable demise of the Irish language is only one index of the ensuing assault on what had become an oral culture. And though it is possible to account for that demise in terms of the mass emigrations that took place mostly from predominantly Irish-speaking areas, or in relation to the pragmatic realization of those who remained that their survival depended on proficiency in English, there is little doubt as to the equal force of the post-Famine traumatization of a whole culture. Nor is this an entirely superstitious or fanciful supposition on the part of Irish people. The legitimation of British administrative practice throughout the period lay in the intersection of the pragmatic logic of political economy, for which the Famine represented a god-sent opportunity to clear the land of excess population, and the assertion of a providential design to punish the Irish for their cultural profligacy.20 That same sense of punishment, as many have noted, produces one of the profoundest legacies of the Famine in the peculiarly conservative forms of Irish Catholicism that emerged at this time. In a very profound sense, the Famine was an experience of punishing social and cultural discipline against which no protest was possible. As James Clarence Mangan put it in the most powerful of contemporary poems, “Siberia”: “In Siberia’s wastes / None curse the Czar.”21 And it is impossible to separate this sense of discipline from either the advent of a new Irish subjectivity or the concomitant freezing of keening, as embodying both mourning and protest, that ensues.

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We can accordingly understand the peculiar dialectic of silence and wailing with which this essay opened as marking the importance of the Famine as a historical watershed. Of course, in Petrie’s account, the silence is the consequence of depopulation, a depopulation that permits the social and economic transformation of Ireland, the gradual consolidation of landholdings into small farms, and the emergence of a “nation-building” class of farmers whose economic interests certainly motivated their adherence to a new and puritanical morality.22 But powerful as the incentive of economic interest clearly is in the combination of cultural amnesia concerning the Famine and in the corresponding need to deflect analysis of its historical and material causes and consequences into its representation as an “act of God,” that amnesia and that deflection strikingly failed in their task. For the Famine recurs, as the repressed must, in indirect and equally deflected cultural forms that continue insistently to mark the cultural singularities of pre- and postindependence Ireland. Anguished and haunting as the wail that counterpoints silence may be, it is not mourning. It is, rather, the representation of a vanishing population regarded as inhabiting the borderlines of nature and culture, as giving vent to an inarticulate and animal cry against a catastrophe to which their own cultural backwardness left them vulnerable and before which they are seen as passive. The silence that ensues is the violent sealing of the empty, howling mouth in a manner that consolidates what have been seen as the peculiarly melancholic forms of Irish cultural expression.23 The advent of modernity in Ireland, with its multiple disciplines, is consequently marked by its difference from that Western modernity that is elsewhere characterized by mourning. This involves not so much a repression, whether of trauma or previous modes of pleasure, as a productive if incomplete attempt at the redisposition of Irish cultural forms, at the very level of bodily and affective practices, to the developmental temporality of modernity. At the same time, the very damage out of which Ireland’s modernity may be seen to have emerged skewed Irish culture into forms that continue to manifest a deep cultural recalcitrance to any normative modernity. To put this another way, it is not in any simple way that post-Famine Ireland lost its culture; we need to understand, rather, that ours is a culture constituted around and marked by an unworked-through loss. But the question that must arise, however, is whether melancholy is in fact the term by which to apprehend the cultural formations that emerge in the wake of the Famine. Does not the invocation of this term, always articulated theoretically since Freud as the negation of a mourning that is a healthy working-through of loss, tend to reinscribe Irish cultural practices as somehow deficient, lacking, and pathological in relation to a normative modernity? I shall go on to suggest that that is precisely what the very commemoration of the Famine in recent years has tended to imply

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as a massive act of public mourning. Yet this is not to argue that the trauma of the Famine and the destructive processes of colonization generally cannot be registered fully in terms of the cultural damage they inflicted. To refuse to do so would be to rationalize Irish history in ways that its singularities constantly elude. What I want to argue here is rather that the project of development that got under way in nineteenth-century Ireland has not so much failed as given rise to a culture that is constantly athwart or out of time with modernity. We can comprehend this by grasping how the relation to damage as loss is counterpointed always by the persistence of damage as a mode of memory. Precisely because it is not a form of erasure or supersession, because it is not subject to even assimilation into the Aufhebung of development, damage itself becomes the locus of survival, the pained trajectory of what lives on and, moreover, continues to resist incorporation. The intricate relation between violence and living on structures the peculiar recalcitrance not only of the colonized but also of a postcolonial culture to the continuing project of modernization. Unlike in Western states where, for the majority, the violence of the state remains a largely unspoken threat, in most colonized societies coercive violence is a constant presence. Though various sectors of the colonized population may, at different times, have quite distinct relations to and even interests in colonial coercion, none is safe from its exercise. In addition, this colonial violence is everywhere a racializing violence, producing its antagonists as objects of a biological and cultural judgment of inferiority. That judgment is based in the inevitably universalizing tendency of the narrative of development that at once legitimates colonial coercion in the name of its concept of humanity and, more important for my argument here, produces in relation to the colonized the effect of an incommensurability of cultures. This incommensurability of cultures, in denying the potential of the colonized culture for its own autonomous development, sets from within an absolute limit to the colonizer’s claim to be the representative of a universally valid human history. Every element of the colonized culture that cannot be translated and assimilated to the development of colonial capitalist modernity must be either erased or encoded as a symptom of underdevelopment. The options of the colonized appear to be reduced to the choice of accepting actual or virtual enslavement on the grounds they have yet to be prepared for civilization or, where possible, of assimilating to the colonial culture. In either case, the colonized are held to be afflicted with a profound sense of the loss of potentiality that is conceptualized as paralysis or, in Fanon’s terms, as “sclerotization” and “petrification.” No space remains for the unfolding of the capacities of the colonized that are out of kilter with modernity; indeed, they are no longer regarded as potentialities at all, but as obstacles to be overcome. Fanon, indeed, notes that the social institutions of the colonized, privatized and

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recoded as their forms of family life, are perceived within the colonial model not as the foundations for the formation of the modern subject but precisely as that which must be abandoned in order that assimilation should proceed.24 The social forms of the colonized become “survivals” of a precapitalist, precolonial past, survivals that have effectively no future, since the terms of the future are determined by the narrative of development that simultaneously determines those forms as no longer even elements of its own prehistory.25 The colonized culture is thus denied any orientation to the future other than one dictated by a colonial modernity that must annihilate not only the complex tissues of its actuality but even its very potentialities. As has often been remarked within postcolonial theory of late, stateoriented nationalisms respond to this paralyzing sense of loss therapeutically by seeking to constitute a new culture and subjecthood around a reinvention of tradition. In doing so, they reproduce the effects of colonial modernity by selecting and canonizing elements of the colonized culture that can be refunctioned within the terms of the modern state. By the same token, they relegate those elements that are incommensurable with modernity to the position of a backwardness that is symptomatic of a refusal to be cured. In the shadow of nationalism, as of colonialism, there lurk, we might say, melancholy survivals. For those of us who would persist in critiquing and opposing the ubiquitous and seemingly endless violence that is constitutive of modernity, it is crucial to discern in those “melancholy survivals” complex forms of living on that preserve not simply belated and dysfunctional practices but potentialities for producing and reproducing a life that lies athwart modernity. This recognition seems to me the commitment of postcolonial work, and I want to argue that a nontherapeutic relation to the past, structured around the notion of survival or living on rather than recovery, is what should guide our critique of modernity and ground a different mode of historicization. The memory of the Irish Famine, in its relation both to imperial and to nationalist projects, accordingly provides a critical space in which to think through a number of issues concerning the recuperative drive of modernizing nationalism, historical representation and popular memory, survival and mourning. My purpose here is not so much to address empirical issues concerning the events of the Famine as to reflect on some aspects of the processes of remembrance and recovery in both official and popular discourses. It is largely agreed that the Famine was sidelined for near on a hundred years in nationalist histories of Ireland, which tended to emphasize the story of Irish resistance from Daniel O’Connell through the Fenians and the Land League to the war of independence. Less auspicious matters such as emigration and starvation would have undercut the attempt to reconstitute a national culture and subjecthood still in the making. Subsequent revisionist histories tended to interpret the Famine through the

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lens of British administrative perspectives and saw it as a natural disaster that overwhelmed the bureaucratic capacities of the state largely on account of the burdens of an objectively excessive population. The massive work of research and rethinking that has been undertaken over the last few years has not only brought the Famine to the center of academic and public discourse on Irish history but also greatly added to our knowledge of that catastrophe. I use the term catastrophe advisedly, since the Famine was clearly not simply a natural disaster but the effect of intersecting vectors of social change that precede and succeed the years of starvation, though in radically different forms. As with any catastrophe, the volatility of those forces, suddenly deflected and disequilibrated by a single and rather simple factor, the unusually extensive presence of the blight, makes the Famine as an “event” virtually impossible to represent. We can summarize at least some of the forces we have seen in play: a number of shifts in the modes of colonial rule after the Union that inaugurate a rationalization of administration in a succession of fields from the economy to policing and law; a concomitant urge to rationalize Irish agricultural practices along capitalist lines that begins to erode the “moral economies” of the eighteenth century; the emergence of a subsistence as opposed to a market monoculture among the poor; an administration committed to imposing the logic of political economy on a recalcitrant population, producing the lines of social conflict that play between incommensurable cultures in the form of agrarian revolt and colonial policing; and, famously, the rapid growth of that population due in large part to the remarkable versatility and productivity of the potato itself. Though the arrival of the blight may have been the effective cause of the failure of the potato crop, the catastrophe is the consequence of what I would regard as a distinctly colonial matrix of forces regulated by the racializing discourse on the Irish that I have been analyzing. The long-standing political and ethnological objectification of the Irish as a population trapped in premodernity and incapable of attaining to subjecthood permitted the view, articulated quite clearly, as Peter Gray has shown, by administrators and economists such as Charles Trevelyan and Nassau Senior, that the Famine was providential, a godsend that made possible the clearing of the land of a redundant people.26 Within the racialized context that permits this degree of objectification, the horrific death rate, the inevitable decimation and scattering of a people, and the destruction of cultural formations incommensurable with modernity become less a question of intentions than of the structural effects of colonialism itself. The Famine, whatever else we wish to say about its contours and meaning, must be seen as a colonial catastrophe. This fact, it seems to me, complicates greatly what it has meant, in our recent commemoration of it, to mourn the Famine. For one thing, what

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was it we were mourning? Did we mourn those who died, who could in many cases not be individually mourned because all who knew them were dead or scattered, because their bodies may have decayed without ever having been located, because they were dumped in mass graves at a time when an overwhelming catastrophe had numbed the capacity for human response on the part of those who might otherwise have mourned? If so, would not rage have been a more apposite response to those deaths and other sufferings for which our mourning is redundant now, rage even at the frustration that our mourning changes nothing? Rage that these things were possible when so much else was equally possible but prohibited? Rage also at the huge loss of human potentiality that the Famine represented? But rage and mourning converge in this: that they have no effect upon what has passed and been lost, most especially when such a deep gulf separates the mourners from the dead. Paradoxically, such public, historical mourning comes to represent not a retrieval of the past or a reactivation of the lost potential in the present but an inward turning decathexis or separation from that which has been lost. In a peculiar and even insidious way, the injunction to mourn becomes, in the complex sense that I have tried to suggest, therapeutic. The function of a public period of commemoration becomes that of letting the dead slip away without the trace of a wake behind them. That is all the more so where, as in so much public commentary throughout the last years from Sinead O’Connor to government ministers, the function of that mourning as socially healing for the present was constantly emphasized. For many, the commemoration was seen as a means precisely to overcome certain “melancholic” fixations and seemingly obsessive repetitions in Irish culture, from alcoholism and domestic abuse to political violence itself. Constantly underlying this urgent discourse was not only the analogy between individual trauma and recovery and a sociohistorical curing but also a distinctly developmental narrative: if we could leave our dead and their sufferings behind and overcome our melancholy, we could shake off at last the burden of the past and enter modernity as fully formed subjects. What was to be mourned was not so much the Famine dead as the meaning of the event itself, as the effect of a fixation on the past that was seen to inhibit the advent of modernity in Ireland. It seems that we have internalized the constant accusation of the British that we are too hung up on history. The commemoration of the Famine becomes unhappily one with a set of current cultural and political tendencies in Ireland that are thrusting the country uncritically into European and transnational capitalist modernity—uncritical not only of the still uncertain effects of our integration on our own social structures and environment, but also of the meaning for ourselves and for others of this alliance with a transnational capitalism whose rapacious, brutal, and destructive past

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is continually reproduced in the present. If we allow commemoration of the dead to become a means to enter more lightly into the new world order, are we not in fact reproducing the attitudes of the colonialism that destroyed them, as well as reproducing those attitudes in the present with regard to other postcolonial peoples that are undergoing the catastrophes of development? If the function of therapeutic modernity is to have us lose our loss in order to become good subjects, then the very process of mourning the dead is at once their condemnation, their devaluation—perhaps not explicitly but effectively a judgment of their inadequacy as subjects and the inadequacy of their cultural formations to modernity. For if it is true that these formations held them from entering the modernity that their erasure permitted to develop, it is no less true now that our mourning is meant to release us from the embarrassment of their weight upon our psyches. The Famine dead are seen as a haunting of memory that we must throw off because it continues to hold us back; our history, a nightmare weighing upon our brains, a mortal coil to be shuffled off. Walter Benjamin’s ominous dictum can be inverted here: if even our dead are not safe from us, the enemy will have won. The victims of capitalist colonialism continue to accumulate around the world; there is no shortage of the dead, but mourning will not save them retrospectively. I want to take another path than that of mourning here, one that hopefully will not seem merely to take the way of melancholia. We have seen the risks of a psychosocial concept of the work of mourning that is at the same time fully informed by a dominant historical conception of human development. That historical conception is not merely an ethical ideal but also an end that regulates historical method and evaluation, from the selection and legitimation of archives and sources to the organizing modes of narrative. It bears, moreover, an idea of the human subject that is the product of that narrative and the ideal of the discipline itself—the disinterested subject of modern civil society. The legitimacy of any given historical utterance is proportional to its coherence with the emergence of such a subject. By the same token, the therapeutic ends of the narrative of development tend to require a series of more or less critical events that are the effects of certain causes and the cause of further events. Though every element of this historical discourse may not be manifest in every historical work, generally speaking it is within these parameters that canonical history proceeds. For that reason I have been turning to the question of how the Famine is remembered in popular memory rather than in official history, and I hope that my remarks may suggest some alternative procedures for postcolonial theory. A recurrent assertion within studies that invoke popular memories and accounts of the Famine is that that catastrophe was most generally explained by its survivors as an act of God that punished the Irish peasantry,

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whether for the folly of continuing to speak Irish, the waste of potatoes in prior years of abundance, or other less commonly invoked sins. This assertion is interesting on several counts. It denies any secular, historical consciousness to the peasantry of the 1840s by removing the Famine from the framework of human acts and motivations. Accordingly, it precludes the possibility of a political or economic understanding of the Famine on the part of that peasantry and, of course, makes it improbable that there was any consciousness of Ireland as a colonized country circulating among the poor, despite the contemporaneous work of Young Ireland and Daniel O’Connell or the continual agrarian protests of the previous four decades or more. At the same time, this assertion invokes precisely the sense of punishment whose internalization would have produced a mood of melancholy fatalism in Irish culture. This has indeed been one explanation for the peculiarly conservative quality of the version of Catholicism that emerged in Ireland after the Famine and for what has often been seen as the generally melancholy disposition of Irish cultural forms. The question, as ever, is whether the sense of punishment produced this melancholy or is retrospectively required in order to substantiate a cultural judgment that this is indeed the negative or disabling characteristic that holds Ireland back from modernity. One might also ask whether the sense of punishment could thus have persisted without the reinforcement of a continuing and exploitative colonial regime. Certainly the prevalence of a rather similar, if somewhat more self-serving, view within the British administration legitimated the administrative application of the doctrines of political economy to the management of the Famine. As I have argued, the contingent failure of the potato crop provides not only the occasion for the most massive enterprise of land clearance in Irish and probably British imperial history but also—for what was in the long term a no less significant cultural transformation—the deep, though never complete, penetration of the mentality of political economy into the disciplining of the Irish body. The subsequent meaning of the Famine as a cultural event can be interpreted only in the light of this undergoing of and resistance to a distinctly colonial discipline. This is not to suggest that the notion that the Irish peasantry themselves understood the Famine in terms of divine punishment is an entire historical fiction. The collections of the Irish Folklore Commission, taken from mostly oral accounts of the Famine gathered in 1945, are full of references to this belief. Here, John MacCarthy recalls Jeremiah Murphy’s memory of the Famine: . . . The famine was the will of God, something should happen to the people for the way they ill used fine food the year before it. The year before it, he said, there was never such a crop of potatoes as grew in the country. There was food for man and beast, if they were cared, but the people had so much of them that they put fine food out over the fields for manure.

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It was remarked by many old wise heads at the time, that great want would surely follow great waste, and their words came true.27

Comments like these are everywhere to be found throughout the records, though, of course, collected as they were among the children and grandchildren of the Famine generation, there are no first-hand comments of this nature. But the emphasis on the fact that it was the old who tended to think in this way is striking. For equally common, however, are comments that incorporate a providential understanding of the Famine within a more elaborated one that is political in implication: In some cases the whole family was wiped out. 2, 3 and 4 of other families dropped, for the hand of God was on them, but even so they did not grumble at His Divine Majesty for the infliction he put upon them. They suffered from bad Government. A Government that passed a Coersion [sic] Act forbidding them to be abroad at night, lest they may steal some food or raid the landlord’s demesne. . . . The Government well helped the famine by refusing to assist the poor suffering creatures[—]young and old alike suffered, they wanted to thin the population and break down their spirit. They carried shiploads of corn from Cork to England or allowed it to be carried so that the landlord whom the Government supported may have his dues. Hence started emigration from here to U.S.A. . . . 28

Indubitably, this second- or third-generation account of the Famine may be filtered through the grid of post-Famine political interpretations and inflected by the memory of a series of social movements—Fenian agitation, Land League actions, the war of independence—and even by continuing republican campaigns. Such political movements are part of the cultural matrix that continually informs and transforms popular memory. There is no singular memory of the past at all, whether historical or popular, let alone one of the Famine. Both individual and social memory, which in any case necessarily intersect, are the sedimentations of material and discursive struggles, the latter already contests over the meaning to be assigned to events, over what signifies as an event. And it is rarely in the interest of popular subjectivity to fix meanings and events for good. Even, if not especially, what Gramsci terms somewhat disparagingly the “folkloristic,” or popular “common sense,” is rifted and layered with the traces not only of formerly hegemonic philosophy but equally of continuing counterhegemonic struggles.29 It is our task, I think, not to try to purify these accounts of subsequent accretions but to understand how they explicitly and implicitly refigure historical understandings of the event. I will turn here to one extensive account of the consequences of the Famine recorded in the Irish Folklore Commission survey, an account that seems to me in some way to indicate how the Famine figures in popular

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memories as both a complex psychic and political set of effects. The story was related by Sean Crowley, who was eighty-four at the time of the telling, and what I quote here follows a quite detailed account of the aftereffects of the Famine in his area: But he [Crowley’s father] said, when one trouble was over they had to face another. The rent warners were out looking for two years rent. The people hadn’t it, they sold anything they could sell, some farmers sold even their last cow to try to pay something, others couldn’t pay anything neither could his next door neighbours,—they were Mahoneys—pay anything. They were told they would be evicted, but they had hopes for the landlord they knew to be a good man, and he wouldn’t have the heart to throw them out. He didn’t but he sold his property to the landlord known as Lord Bandon, a heartless man. The poor tenants, of coarse [sic] didn’t know what was going on until one Spring morning the townland was full of red-coat soldiers. From one end to the other they put out every tenant in it. He often told, how the red coat soldier rode up on his horse to the door, and asked for the man of the house. His father went out. “We want possession of this place, you’d better clear out.” The old man was like a man who would be after getting a blow. He stood looking at the red coat, unable to speak. “Get to work and clear out” was the next, quick order. “Oh wisha Dia linn” was all the old man could say, as he turned in. It wasn’t like evictions later on, when the bailiff and his men would put every article of furniture outside the door, and be booed and jeered by a crowd of men on the fences around. No, the soldiers stood by, and made the people themselves put out their furniture, and there was no one to say, boo, for the sight of a ‘red coat’ struck terror into the people. “We want the key” says the fellow in command when the last article of furniture was out. But, God help us, there was no lock to the door. A hasp on the outside, and a bar of iron from wall to wall was used to make it fast on the inside, but it was never used, the door was always unbarred, and a sod always burned on the hearth, for the poor carriers to come in to light their pipes when passing, either day or night. The old man brought out the bar, and he said afterwards, what he’d like to have done with it was to give the soldier a blow of it. But he didn’t he threw it towards him on the road. “Yo damn swine” muttered the soldier, as he rode off with his men to the next house. Before the sun was gone down that evening every tenant in that townland was homeless. It was a sad picture, my father said, to see two or three little families talking between themselves, trying to console each other, and trying to plan some way out of their troubles.

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The priest came, he had been called to one poor old woman that was dying on the roadside after being put out, she died there too. He went from family to family in the whole townland, trying to comfort and console them. He advised them, when the night would fall to take the old people into the houses to rest there for the night, and the young men to remain and watch, in case the soldiers would make another visit, and to do this until they had found some other homes. The cows the soldiers had driven from the lands, they wandered onto the roads, and remained there until the May fair in Bandon where they were sold. ’Twas a sad tale, not one tenant ever went back to till the sod of Lisnacunna, they scattered everywhere. Three families, two families of the Mahoneys and a McCarthy family went off to America. The money they made of their few cows paid their passage over, I never heard to what part of America, for when the old neighbours they had, scattered away they didn’t know where to send a line to, so they were not heard of after.30

This is, of course, not a tale of the Famine per se, but what interests me is how it situates the Famine within what we might term a chronic narrative rather than one of crisis and recovery. I do not mean by this just, as Crowley puts it, that when one trouble was over they had to face another. Rather, the meaning of the Famine does not lie in itself as an event, but in how it comes to signify within a set of practices through which the confrontation of incommensurable social formations produces new and again differing formations. These formations are no less incommensurable, and it is certainly not the case that the culture of the oppressed is either absorbed into the modernizing drive that eviction and enclosure represent or that it fails to survive. The rationalizing and violent processes of colonialism, which are again and again related within the records returned to the Folklore Commission, institute new formations of property in Ireland through the humiliations of eviction that are the necessary counterpart of the administrative commitment to imposing the ideological disciplines of political economy on the Irish. The punishing effects of eviction, which draw together the military violence of colonialism with the epistemological and cultural violence of racialization, transform the biological occurrence of the blight into the chronically traumatic narrative of Irish hunger. Yet the narrative of the confrontation between these forces and the culture of the peasantry entails not the annihilation of an older tradition but the emergence of other modes of living on. In this one story, we apprehend vividly the meaning of the Famine, eviction, and emigration for a community, but we see no less that the lament for the passing is at one with the effort to create new communities of survival and is in no way an absolute and therapeutic mourning of the lost. We might say, invoking some apt Irish expressions, that to pass on is to be changed. And the changed live on in

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strange ways. In eviction, homelessness, death, and the scattering of emigration, there is no recovery to be traced but only the conditions of a transformed subjectivity, subdued but not subjected. Throughout this narrative, we can trace the contours of an emerging ethic of cultural and economic survival in the midst of the brutality and humiliation of eviction. The humiliation and powerlessness of colonized people before the combined weight of the economic, legal, and military power of the colonial regime materialize in the encircling red coats, in the contempt that allows them to force the families to empty their own houses, in the callousness that leaves the old to die on the roadside, in the “Yo damn swine” of the officer, and in the unstressed fact that the sale of the land to Lord Bandon was never communicated to the tenants. In some ways it is this last detail that most exemplifies the dehumanization of the colonized, the denial to them of an interest in the future that is the index of human subjectivity. Yet that future horizon frames in this narrative an understanding of how the future emerges, changed, out of such catastrophes. It is indeed through the perspective of a later, collective reaction to eviction that refuses to assent passively to humiliation that the stirrings of resistance and the determination to survive in altered states come to signify. It is probably only from that perspective that the understated elements of this drama could find their meanings once again. The comparison with subsequent scenes of eviction highlights how in catastrophe the orientation toward the future that we will call living on emerges quite simply in the actions of the people. The priest helps to ensure the safety of the old and a probably new defensive collective among the rest; in flinging the iron bar to the ground, Crowley’s father signifies the anger and recalcitrance out of which a more organized movement will come; in these apparently futile gestures the narrative seems to allegorize the most intimate, even minimal, acts that remake the terms for collective survival. At the heart of that allegory is the iron bar itself, around which the disjunction between the violence of expropriation and the humanity of survival is articulated. For what is thrown before the officer is the antithesis of the key that he demands: an item without use, since there is no property to be protected and no barring of the door in the moral economy of the Irish poor. The image of the poor carriers lighting their pipes at night at strangers’ hearths is starkly juxtaposed to the officer’s almost risible assumption that here home is a property to be locked up and that where there is property there must naturally be a key to be handed over. But there is nothing “natural” or primordial in either of the incommensurable economies represented in this tableau; they meet contemporaneously as mutually constitutive effects of colonization. On the one hand, the unprecedented capitalist rationalization of colonial property, permitted to take qualitatively and quantitatively new forms by the occasion the Famine of-

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fered, seems even in its violence as natural as a house key to the officer; on the other, a moral economy of the poor, determined by the necessary reciprocities of subsistence at the margins of colonialism, undergoes a drastic and irreversible transformation and is reconstituted out of kilter with the modernization that would engulf it. Lying athwart the path of the soldier, the iron bar that once represented only the superfluity of its function now marks, in a minimal gesture perhaps, the persistence of an ethos that escapes the logic of property and economic reason. The soldier himself, muttering his subdued abuse, can only turn his back to this peculiarly resonant crossing of his order. As for us, rather than lament the futility of that gesture or rush to trace in it the contours of a resistance that will emerge in more articulate forms, we should perhaps for a moment suspend the image of this iron bar cast on the road as the die turns in the air before it falls to the ground. In the very cusp of the catastrophe, this turning bespeaks the memory of alternative possibilities that live on athwart the mournful logic of historicized events. NOTES

The epigraph is from Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 255. 1. George Petrie, The Ancient Music of Ireland (1855), cited in Seamus Deane, A Short History of Irish Literature (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), 79. 2. Liam O’Flaherty, Famine (Dublin: Wolfhound, 1984; originally published 1937), 302, 304. 3. Thomas Gallagher, Paddy’s Lament: Ireland 1846–1847: Prelude to Hatred (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), 5–6. 4. William Carleton, The Black Prophet: A Tale of Irish Famine (London: Simms and McIntyre, 1847), 178–79. 5. Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall, Ireland: Its Scenery, Character, and History, 2 vols. (Boston: Nicholls and Co., 1911; originally published 1841), 1: 294n. Strictly speaking, of course, the kind of informal expressions of grief or anxiety implied here are not identical with the highly artful practice of keening as it is now understood. See Angela Bourke, “Performing Not Writing,” Graph 11 (winter 1991–92), for an account of the formal complexities and traditions of keening. 6. Hall, Ireland, 2: 86. 7. Hall, Ireland, 2: 90. 8. T. Crofton Croker, Researches in the South of Ireland, Illustrative of the Scenery, Architectural Remains, and the Manners and Superstitions of the Peasantry (London: John Murray, 1824), 172–73. 9. Croker, Researches in the South of Ireland, 181–82. That the keen was often used as a means to articulate political anger is borne out by Mrs. S. C. Hall’s more extensive account in Ireland, 2: 90–92. The keen’s articulation of political or social criti-

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cism was, however, by no means confined to comment on British colonialism. As Angela Bourke remarks, “The texts that survive howl in protest and anger at death and at injustice in the world of the living, and the oral tradition offers many examples of women engaging in verbal battles with priests” (Bourke, “Performing,” 31). 10. For a discussion of Arnold’s Celtic Literature, see my Nationalism and Minor Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 6–13. On ethnic stereotypes of the Irish, which have force down to the present, and on the ethnographic writings that gave them scientific legitimacy in the nineteenth century, see L. P. Curtis’s Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature (Newton Abbott: David and Charles, 1971). 11. For important reflections on allegories of loss as a function of ethnographic writings, see James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Allegory,” in James Clifford and George E. Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 98–121. 12. Norbert Elias, Power and Civility, vol. 2: The Civilizing Process (New York: Pantheon, 1982), 238. 13. Hall, Ireland, 2: 87. 14. Croker, Researches in the South of Ireland, 2. 15. I have discussed its developed form in the Unionist writings of Samuel Ferguson in Nationalism and Minor Literature, 83–85. John Stuart Mill’s On Representative Government (London: J. M. Dent, 1910; originally published 1863) is one of the classic statements of the distinction between English readiness for government and the necessity for a government of “leading strings” in the case of subject peoples like those of India. 16. Croker, Researches in the South of Ireland, 12–13. 17. The common misconception that English administrative responses to the Irish Famine were simply informed by the economic doctrines prevalent throughout Europe at the time has been cogently challenged by Peter Gray’s comparative studies of Belgian, French, and Dutch responses to famine in their own nations in the same period. Peter Gray, “Famine Relief Policy in Comparative Perspective: Ireland, Scotland and the Low Countries, 1845–49,” paper delivered at the New York University International Conference on Hunger, New York, May 1995. 18. Thomas A. Boylan and Timothy P. Foley, Political Economy and Colonial Ireland: The Propagation and Ideological Function of Economic Discourse in the Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1992), 116. 19. Elsewhere I have discussed this hierarchy of the senses, from Kant’s and Schiller’s aesthetic theory to Freudian analysis, in relation to the imbrication of race and culture. See “Race under Representation,” Oxford Literary Review 13 (spring 1991): 62–94; and “The Narrative of Representation: Culture, the State and the Canon,” in Rethinking Germanistik: Canon and Culture, ed. Robert Bledsoe et al. (New York: Peter Lang, 1991), 125–38. 20. See Peter Gray, “Ideology and the Famine,” in The Great Irish Famine, ed. Cathal Póirteír (Cork: Mercier, 1995), 86–103, for a recent discussion of religious attitudes to the Famine. 21. James Clarence Mangan, “Siberia,” in Poems, intro. John Mitchel (New York: P. M. Haverty, 1859), 433.

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22. On this consolidation of landholdings after the Famine and its relation to Irish politics, see S. J. Connolly, “The Great Famine and Irish Politics,” in The Great Irish Famine, ed. Póirteír, 49. 23. Kevin Whelan notes: “A certain amount of iron entered the Irish soul in the Famine holocaust.” See his “Pre- and Post-Famine Landscape Change,” in The Great Irish Famine, ed. Póirteír, 32. My own essay was originally suggested by remarks made by Seamus Deane on the melancholy forms of Irish writing during a lecture delivered at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1994. 24. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 148–49. 25. For a provocative and suggestive account of the distinction in Marx between those social phenomena that are and are not part of the “prehistory” of capital, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Two Histories of Capital,” in Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 47–71. 26. See Gray, “Ideology and the Famine.” 27. “The Famine in Cork, Clare and Waterford,” University College, Dublin, Irish Folklore Commission, Ms. 1071, comments of John MacCarthy, recorded by Diarmuid O Cruadloir, 276. 28. “The Famine in Cork, Clare and Waterford,” record of Sean O Duinnsleibhe [?], 28–29. 29. See Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 34. 30. “The Famine in Cork, Clare and Waterford,” comments of Sean Crowley, recorded by Diarmuid O Cruadloir, 301–5.

Susette Min

Remains to Be Seen Reading the Works of Dean Sameshima and Khanh Vo

On the eve of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, the front page of the New York Times featured photographs taken by a corps of Communist (Vietcong) photographers.1 Amid the pictures “from the other side,” one particular photograph caught the attention of artist Khanh Vo.2 The photograph was taken by Duong Thanh Phong on the day he left his refuge (the Cu Chi tunnels) to celebrate the last day of the war. Hitching a ride to Saigon, Phong rode along a road littered with hundreds of military boots, socks, and other apparel discarded by South Vietnamese soldiers who had ripped their uniforms off to mingle with civilians. Standing on the back of a car, Phong photographed the remains of “celebratory” undress—literally hundreds of boots and socks were strewn along the road like confetti left after a party. The scattered remains of an event that happened twenty-five years ago as pictured in the New York Times photo appeared eerily familiar in its resemblance to a work of art by Khanh Vo in an exhibition I curated entitled the mourning after (1999). However, in contrast with the New York Times photograph, Vo’s April 25, 1975 (resonance) is a space of refuge, a primary place that he calls a “refugee space.” In his artist statement he writes: The idea of the refugee space is a concept I constructed to explore the displacement experienced by Viet Namese living in the U.S. It speaks of geographic locations and psychological states of mind. Sanctuary is sought . . . [yet] this quest for shelter/safety results in a perception of falseness; every place is a substitution for the original. A fragile existence arises out of this dilemma. It is burdened by memories of the past and endlessly driven in the search for a new space to call “home.” The refugee space is one that sits between hope, disappointment, and loss.3 229

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In April 25, 1975 (resonance) (1995), Vo covers the gallery’s floor with cardboard, places found objects on it, then covers the entire composition with packing tape, leaving the objects perceptible only by their protruding shapes: a picture frame, articles of clothing—shirts, blouses, pants, skirts, sandals, a pair of men’s formal shoes—and more.4 The subdued colors and layered strips of packing tape create a visually beautiful and moving space— a terrain that evokes metaphorically what has been referred to as a riverbed arrested in motion or the aftermath of a nuclear meltdown.5 The work’s foundation of drywall, cardboard, and layers of packing tape traversed by the viewer simultaneously grounds and destabilizes the experience. The reproduction of Phong’s photograph and Vo’s installation initially seem similar, for both attempt to suspend, preserve, and fix the abandoned remains within a contextual frame. The clothing scattered on a road in the photograph and underneath a metaphorical mud of packing tape in April 25, 1975 evokes loss, both voluntary and forced. Photography serves as a medium about loss insofar as its function is to fix literally the transitory and the ephemeral. Phong’s photograph preserves the event of a casting off of clothes that signify war. The timely emergence of the New York Times photographs on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Vietnam War too signals a casting off of conflict and ambivalence toward a war that was at one time seen as a loss of national resolve. In contrast, the dispersed remains in April 25, 1975 (resonance) evoke both a loss and a refusal of that loss. That is, whereas the New York Times photograph by the so-called enemy attempts to fix a collective, almost universal celebration of the end of a war, Vo’s installation works like memory in an attempt to resuscitate and preserve an untimely evacuation whose impetus has been obliterated by what Asian American cultural critic Lisa Lowe remarks as “an unresolved contradiction, a return of the repressed, a gash that would not heal.”6 April 25, 1975, marks the date Vo was forced to flee his home and homeland of Vietnam. The date and an itemization of what first seem like random objects on the floor—mainly clothing and photos—point to an evacuation or hurried escape gone awry.

I begin my essay with these two images because they each bear witness to different experiences of a historical moment etched in time but share elements of absence and loss that spread off the page and seep under gallery walls. As I was conceptualizing the curatorial premise for the exhibition the mourning after, I noticed that certain works of contemporary art not only evoked a feeling of melancholy but also, more important, constituted a loss that drew me in through artistic strategies of repetition, substitution, and refabrication. The focus in the mourning after was on the lost object, how are loss and, in some cases, its overcoming represented? The focus in this essay

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Khanh Vo, April 25, 1975 (resonance), 1995, installation view (courtesy of the artist)

is to question and reconsider the impulse, the objective of representing the lost object. To different degrees, selected artists in the mourning after shared this compulsion to preserve loss by suspending and controlling time through space, suggestion, and allusion. In addition, they all shared similar, formal artistic strategies that ran the gamut from serializing to collecting through their choices of medium (the photograph and the video), manipulation of materials (molded wax, used plywood, thrift store clothes), and the deployment of visual metaphors for loss and longing. Through the use of these visual metaphors within a strategy of nonlinear, fragmented, and overlapping narratives, the works in the mourning after created an interruption, a gap that complicated the narrative of melancholia and opened a point of entry into a world where objects became something new, something different. How do certain works endeavor to address loss not only as an individual and isolated process but also as a collective one, through a kind of performative transference that reinvests the lost object into the gallery, the social, the public sphere? In particular I am interested in how Vo’s installation and Dean Sameshima’s photographs of empty beds (which I will describe and discuss later in the essay) visually articulate mourning and melancholia

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not only as internal processes but also as constitutive of social materiality. How are mourning and melancholia given representational shape? Do their works defy or defer loss? By foregrounding the compulsions of these two artists to preserve and/ or to compensate loss through substituting found or created objects and images in place of the lost object, this essay attempts to examine the dialectical relationship between mourning and melancholia as metaphors of becoming and as figures of production. Through close readings of works by Khanh Vo and Dean Sameshima’s In Between Days (Without You) (1998),7 I attempt to explore how these works, through a continual renegotiation of the symbolics of loss, activate specific themes implicit in the works themselves: for Vo, the working-through of a repressed history and lost homeland, and for Sameshima, the deferral and play of a fugitive and inexpressible desire. I conclude that their works do not represent mourning and melancholia per se but intercut the dialectical process between the two through a performative reading that depends upon the interrelationship between the object and viewer. In both this essay and the exhibition, I begin with the question: What are mourning and melancholia? Neither term can be considered as a simple reflection on death or loss. Melancholy conventionally signifies interiority, withdrawal, and contemplation, yet even Sigmund Freud acknowledges in “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917) that the understanding of melancholia is not very clear.8 Freud distinguishes the two as follows: mourning grieves for a literal loss that results in decathexis, the breaking of an attachment, whereas melancholia fixates on an imaginary loss, refusing to let go, and instead relocates the loss in what he calls “the region of memory-traces of things.”9 Later in that essay, Freud makes and then blurs the distinction between loss as abstract and as real by redirecting his attention to mourning as a survival tactic that enables the bereaved to grieve by letting go of and breaking attachment to the lost object. The lost object may be a friend, an event, a place, or an ideal abstraction such as love, democracy, or citizenship. It may also encompass other orders of loss, aside from death, that range from disappointments to misgivings. In contrast, Freud perceives melancholia as a refusal to let go that leads to a pathological condition, an impoverished ego as the effect of an ungrieved loss. The melancholic, whose attitude toward the lost object is passionately felt, staves off this loss through the process of incorporation, a process in which residues of the lost object are internalized by the grieving subject and taken up as parts of himself or herself. Incorporation involves a withdrawal from the lost object and into oneself. In “The Ego and the Id” (1923), Freud writes, “The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego . . . not merely a surface but the projection of a sur-

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face.”10 A representation of the object becomes installed within the ego, and identification with the object replaces an object-cathexis. In other words, instead of an investment being displaced onto another object, the ego narcissistically identifies with the abandoned object, which results in a tripartite structure (id, ego, superego). The ego becomes the “poor” substitute for the object while also rebounding upon itself to create the superego and ego ideal.11 In “Mourning and Melancholia” Freud indicates that the self’s relation to the lost object before the time of incorporation is not a simple one, since he writes, “It is complicated by the conflict of ambivalence.”12 Incorporating the lost object exacerbates this ambivalence in the form of negation and lack because of the self’s initial inability to articulate or externalize the loss. At the same time, the incorporation of the lost object becomes not only a preservation of the loss but also an idealization of loss in the form of an ego-ideal. The ego-ideal becomes the measuring stick “against which the ego is judged by the super-ego.”13 The ego can never live up to its ego-ideal because of its status as a poor and incomplete substitute, generating aggression against the ego. The aggressive tango between the ego and the superego ultimately leads to stasis and immobility, allowing the superego to become the gathering place for the death drive.14 In contrast with the regressive movement of melancholia and the impoverishment of the ego that Freud narrates, Giorgio Agamben’s theories on the subject highlight melancholia’s compulsion, its will to transform an object of contemplation into an amorous embrace.15 Specifically, Agamben points to Freud’s failure to elaborate on the role of the phantasm in incorporation. Central to understanding Agamben’s conceptualization of incorporation as a means of both preserving and magically insuring one against a double loss is his focus on the phantasmatic. For Agamben, the history of melancholia serves as a reference point from which to appropriate medieval medical and mystical theory, literature of the Renaissance, and the philosophies of Western metaphysics and experience to highlight melancholia’s relationship with the erotic impulse in order to hold and fix the phantasms. In particular, the perception and fear of black bile during the Middle Ages as an amorously and dangerously fantastic way to imagine permits Agamben to view melancholia as a metaphor of becoming. Agamben perceives incorporation as a kind of introjective turn that confers upon the lost object a phantasmatic reality, enabling the existence of the unreal to unfold while opening up the possibility for the object to embark on a relationship with the ego. That is, as the melancholic withdraws from the lost object and takes it in, he or she also turns away from reality or from what Agamben refers to as the perception of reality.16 On one hand, a conflicting and aggressive relationship ensues between the desire to want and the desire to have, in which the former defers the real,

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and the latter needs to penetrate the real, threatening the desire itself. On the other hand, the intense turn away from reality can also unfold into another “aesthetic and sublime” realm of experience in which the lost object appears “lost” in order for it to become real. This “other” realm of experience leads to what Juliana Schiesari critiques as the reproduction of a “heroic” (i.e., male) tradition of genius and creation, as in Agamben’s examples of Renaissance and Romantic poets.17 But for Agamben, the melancholic impulse exhibited in his sundry literary references reveals not only a melancholic strain but, significantly for my purposes, also mourning externalized within the body of a poem.18 Returning for a moment to Freud: for him, the ego within the process of mourning and melancholia becomes a repository and multilayered history of attached and abandoned object-choices. For Freud, the surface of the ego “appears to be the sedimentation of objects loved and lost, the archaeological remainder, as it were, of unresolved grief.”19 The appearance of what Freud designates as the region of memory-traces of things complicates the temporality of melancholia’s relationship with mourning. Even after a “proper mourning,” a sense of self may be fully infected by the residues and memories of the lost object, in which case mourning is a process with no beginning or end, blurring the division of labor between mourning and melancholia. Moreover, Freud remarks further that melancholia permits one to mourn, to let go of the lost object from the external world, only to transfer it internally. While incorporation involves the mechanisms of identification, melancholia mimics and intensifies this process of mourning, in which metonymic traces of the lost object become embedded in the production of a psychic topography. Identification, according to Diana Fuss, is “an embarrassingly ordinary process, a routine, habitual compensation for everyday loss of our love-objects.”20 We might go one step further and suggest that these metonymic traces that fill one’s psychic landscape also emerge and constitute selected works of contemporary art similar to those cultural examples cited by Agamben. The impulse in the mourner to reinstate the lost loved object in the ego points to another way of looking at melancholia as a production of becoming. According to Judith Butler, the ego comes into consciousness through melancholia. She reminds us that gender, produced as a ritualized repetition of conventions, cannot be literally perceived or performed. She describes psychoanalysis’s insistence on the opacity of the unconscious as setting limits on the exteriorization of the psyche: what is exteriorized or performed can be understood only by reference to what is barred from performance, what cannot or will not be performed. For example, she discusses drag performances as an allegorization of melancholy. She describes the drag queen as a melancholic because of his inability to declare aggres-

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sively a love and a loss. As a result, the drag queen begins to mime the lost object through “an incorporative fantasy of melancholia whereby an object is phantasmatically taken in.”21 The performance becomes at once a turning away from reality and an “acting out.” Butler cautions that the drag performance is not entirely self-motivated; rather, it is roused by an “unowned aggression.”22 She poses the following question: “What is the place of ‘acting out’ in relation to symptomatic expression, especially when beratement escapes the intrapsychic circuit to emerge in displaced and externalized forms?”23 Melancholia’s refusal to let go and to “act out” implies that the relationship between the ego and the lost object is not necessarily a passive or a static one. If we define melancholia as a metaphor of becoming, we might propose the following question: Can a drag queen who tells his tale to an “audience” through gestures and perhaps through a melodramatic narrative implicitly initiate a collective experience in order to share his aggression and grieve his loss? Incorporation generates not only aggression but also with it a substitution. Substitution literally means “to replace the lost object with something else.” At the same time, the substituted object is always incompatible with or unequal to the lost object. Substitution pressures a rearticulation of the object, an expression of grief in and through the ego’s relationship to the object. Agamben’s Renaissance poets, Butler’s drag queen, and the works by Vo and Sameshima reveal a double movement of production and becoming. The psychic turn inward re-presents a loss or a series of multiple losses. In this sense, melancholia is not purely regressive but implicitly is always a process of becoming. But how does this re-presentation of loss become externalized when melancholia, following Agamben’s conceptualization of incorporation, is a turning away from reality, a turning away from perception, from the real? Schiesari raises the question of whether melancholia can be seen as a kind of floating signifier: “The very definition of melancholia, in Freud’s term, ‘fluctuates’ thereby resisting interpretative closures.”24 To free melancholia from fixed signification opens a new semantic field that enables a variety of conceptual moves on different registers. Signifiers are never fixed but depend upon particular cultural contexts, as seen in the possibility of multiple layered readings of Sameshima’s photography and Vo’s installation. The textual coalitions that are generated by the different sign changes within each of the works create a register of paradoxical desires and projections. The works by Sameshima and Vo are neither antivisual nor immaterial. In the spare conceptualism of these works, the residues of the lost object are also never fully represented or recuperated. My readings of Sameshima and Vo that follow challenge representations of melancholia as regressive, immobile, and static. Through their formal strategies and performative reading practices, Vo and Sameshima on different spatial scales reinvest the lost into the social.

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At first glance Sameshima’s photographs do not reveal very much. Sameshima presents a series of fifteen eight-by-ten-inch color photographs, laid out horizontally like a calendrical sequence, of empty twin beds in the corner of a small room, taken from a three-quarter point of view. In each image, Sameshima directs a spotlight of a different color—ranging from aqua blue to rose pink to blood red—onto the bed, which is situated against a dark background. With the exception of a side table, a pack of cigarettes, a light switch, and sheets covering the bed, not much else can be seen in the spare and narrow room. From a distance the uniform composition of the beds, white mat, and black frame, all placed in a horizontal row, creates a kind of symmetry, with only color distinguishing each individual photograph. But such symmetry doesn’t lead to abstraction; rather, the series of made-up and rumpled beds evokes domesticity, encapsulates the “private,” and conjures tranquil bodies in repose. Coming in closer, we see that the beds, which have been used, slept in, lain on, evoke an ambiguous sense of longing and loss. The presence of human bodies is absent from the scene, yet their absence is palpable. The beds transform in character and significance when the observer learns from the catalog essay that the empty twin beds are located in the private rooms of underground gay sex clubs.25 The information imbues the image with a sense of loss—of empty beds, that is, absent bodies—a refrain of lonely and unfulfilled nights, especially if read in correspondence with its title In Between Days (Without You).26 Scattered details—the pillows, the rumpled sheets, a pack of cigarettes— serve as clues of an encounter that in scene after scene seems to revolve around anterior events. The cubicle-sized bedrooms are at once filled with expectations and utterly depleted of them. The colors turquoise and vermilion red soak up and saturate the images, as if to fill in what has been left behind.27 Seen in this way, Sameshima’s tightly constructed rendering of rooms in a gay sex club suggests an attempt both to contain and to remove the bare remains: the trace of a body and of bodies. Sameshima’s photographs of saturated colors and repeated images of the rooms foreshortened by the three-quarter angle of the beds picture the displaced remains of that which is unrepresentable. The “what” of Sameshima’s lost object fits within Butler’s conceptualization of gender (homosexuality becomes heterosexuality’s ungrieved loss), because the photographs of the empty beds and absent bodies seem to be a displaced affect for a longing of love that can be realized only through the denial of and desire for other kinds of “illicit” attachments.28 Turning our attention to the repetition of photographs: the depiction of the same room fifteen times over reveals a compulsion that indeed seems motivated by a loss that the artist cannot grieve and yet is compelled to repeat. Intrinsic to desire is the absence of bodies, of things.

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Dean Sameshima, In Between Days (Without You), 1998, photographic series detail, red bed (courtesy of the artist and LOW, Los Angeles)

At the same time, a performative reading of these photographs locates this absence between a shutting down and an opening up of desire. If we agree with Butler’s provocative suggestion that one’s object-choice is a displaced remnant of that which cannot be represented, then Sameshima’s photographs pose the question of what it means to displace this unnameable loss and/or longing and haunting onto the viewer. To view Sameshima’s photographs is to see the absence/presence of bodies. Put another way, Sameshima’s photographs insist on a vision rooted in the corporeality of the lost object; that is, they hinge on a viewer’s projections. Sameshima’s photographic strategy and imaginative capacity do not betray an eclipse or foreclosure of desire but rather make an unobtainable object appear lost. The ambiguity of the images forces the viewer to work and to fantasize. While the images echo recent departures and arrivals, the residues of loss remain ambiguous. Loss appears to dissolve into the glossy reflective surface of the few items in the room—bed, sheets, pillow, pack of cigarettes, and light switch. Privileging a minimalist aesthetic, the sparseness of Sameshima’s photographs enables a “desiring fantasy” to take hold. Recalling Agamben’s concept of melancholia’s effect “to hold and fix the phantasms” through incorporation, we see that melancholia as “dialectical leavening,”

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as he puts it, highlights the role of fantasy, understood here to mean the absence of the lost object. Absence in and of itself creates a disturbance: a disturbance that opens the possibility of projections that shift the mirror of identification and desire to the viewer. I read Agamben’s interesting word choice of leaven metaphorically as a transformative means by which an impoverished relationship is elevated to a heightened passion and consuming desire for the object.29 The compulsion to stave off a loss so passionately felt underscores melancholia’s relation to eros. For Sameshima, what is at stake is melancholia’s relation to a lost object of desire. Sameshima finds a way, through a formal play of color, line, and light in his photographs of empty beds in In Between Days (Without You), to transfer a desire that cannot be consummated but is instead perpetually deferred. In other words, Sameshima’s photographic strategy transforms desire into a phantasmatic practice that makes an “inappropriate,” or in juridical terms “illicit,” object seem lost. The absence of bodies effectively turns desire not back upon itself but rather onto the viewer. Sameshima’s phantasm/fantasy grounds itself by drawing the viewer in closer to the images in order to highlight and take note of the details within each individual photograph. The small scale of the photographs and the saturated colors that mute the already subtle details force the viewer to step in closer to view them. Each photograph of In Between Days (Without You) is actually much smaller than the picture’s eight by ten inches, most of which is constituted by the white mat and black frame. The size and the shape of the photograph remind one of a postcard. Cultural theorist Susan Stewart describes the postcard as souvenir as “reduc[ing] the public and the threedimensional into the miniature . . . or into [a] two-dimensional representation, that which can be appropriated within the privatized view of the individual subject.” Within this privatized view lies a temporal shift in which the “souvenir moves history into private time.”30 The postcard, whose image is usually photographic, remains silent yet forces the eruption of a narrative. The narrative is propelled by nostalgia. Images of postcards are usually images already seen such as the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building, palm trees in southern California. In contrast with the postcard as souvenir, Sameshima’s photographs depict images not easily recognizable in this already-seen image repertoire. In this sense, postcard images are what Roland Barthes would designate as a studium. In brief, Barthes defines the studium as those “ultimately always-coded”31 images that reaffirm reality without disturbing it. In other words, the studium is part and parcel of a visual matrix that is synonymous with what we know as normal representation, insofar as one looks at a certain image and doesn’t think twice but readily accepts it as part of the cultural landscape.

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In his reflections on photography, Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes conceptualizes the studium in contrast with the punctum as an experience of the photograph as a wound.32 Whereas the studium denotes those coded images that do not create a disturbance, the punctum points to a rereading of Sameshima’s photographs as more than meditative images of individual loss (and would thus bring the images out of the realm of the postcard). The punctum’s function is twofold. It functions on one level as an addition and a supplement to all of Sameshima’s other calculated details. The sweat stains on the sheets, the wood paneling, the lone book of matches rouse in me a cold emptiness that is in contrast with the other photographs that feel almost staged. Barthes writes, “It is this element [the punctum] which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me. . . . it is what I add to the photograph and what is nonetheless already there.”33 A viewer both adds the punctum to the photograph and replaces the photograph with the punctum as a way to look beyond the frame or picture. On another level, the punctum figures as a wound, a puncture that defamiliarizes the already known, illuminates details that at first glance seem insignificant. Note that, for Barthes, the punctum is directed at “straight” photographs, and his concern with the punctum is personal, based on a subjective desire of his own image-repertoire. I move away from Barthes’s narrow definition of the punctum by including not only visual details but also the image’s nonvisual elements—the context in which it is seen. For example, the knowledge that the beds are located in underground sex clubs serves as a punctum that defamiliarizes the “domesticity” or private sanctity of the bedroom. Closer inspection—of the pack of cigarettes, the upright pillow, the soaked sheets, the wash of pastel light—arouses the still image from its flat immobility and gives it life. It animates a life external to the photograph. The emergence of this external life, or what Barthes designates as the “blind field,” encourages one to shift not only the frame of the images but also the context in which they were first seen. The blind field creates the possibility to see the unexpected, to view a drama that has—or has yet to be—unfolded. Sameshima repeats with revision the sign chain created by the different objects in the room through his subtle placement and reconfiguration of props (the pillow, sheets, etc.) and his use of color. The orange red, aquamarine, and candy pink monochromes are not merely random colors that attempt to picture the room differently but colors that hint at something more as they evoke specific yet varied emotional states of passion, coolness, and desolate loneliness. The different photographs conjure fantasy and reality simultaneously and interchangeably, enabling individual desire to break through into a wider social space, from the interior to the exterior.

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Dean Sameshima, In Between Days (Without You), 1998, photographic series detail, white bed (courtesy of the artist and LOW, Los Angeles)

The binary opposition between subject and object, viewer and image, comes undone as well. As Christian Metz notes, “The punctum depends more on the reader, the viewer than on the photograph itself. The corresponding off-frame (blind field) propels a desire beyond what it permits us to see,”34 yet which “nonetheless is already there.”35 As the viewer takes a step closer to view the details, he or she takes the externalized position of a voyeur looking in. The punctum serves as a supplement to a simulation of fantasy that, according to Agamben, enables an unobtainable object to “appear” lost, a fantasy in which the punctum serves as a diversion, a safeguard, in order to preserve the lost object from a double loss. But Sameshima prevents this escape to another “realm,” if only in the viewing of one specific photograph that perforates the phantasm with the real. There is the one photograph in the series in which the bed is lit not by a colored light bulb but by a white one, creating a disturbance, a categorical contrast between seeing the photographs as “fantasy” and making one’s own desire project or deny particular kinds of bodies. In this image, the rucked pillow, the sheets soaked with bodily sweat, and the towel are less a tableau of a passionate encounter than an indication of a palpable reality that is starkly contrasted between the color monochrome photographs and the photograph that shows the room as is, with its sparse accoutrements and cheap

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wood paneling. The photograph with its raw materiality constructs an absence of loss and love while also highlighting the distribution of (in)visible bodies. The indexical sign of the photograph is bound to its referent, physically contiguous or causally connected. That is, the photograph presents the empirical reality of the past (the “that-has-been”).36 Sameshima’s photographs turn private desire into an “open house” glimpse of an untold and unseen drama only surmised by the traces of ongoing human activity through the different props and clues that he provides. Through both form and content, these choices offer an engagement with the world, a materiality through and against images that evoke absent characters whose actions we can only reconstruct. The assumed viewer of a work of art is usually aligned with a centered power to see and to know. The photographs demand that the viewer fill the image with a body and bodies, and yet whose body? Where are the bodies—are they coming or going? The repetition of images in a variety of blues, pinks, reds, the different imprints on the bed, the configurations of the lone pillow, economically and metonymically render the ephemeral and circular exchange of anonymous bodies. Covert repressed desire becomes exteriorized, known, and shared. The future, the becoming of these desires, lies within and through the performativity of interpreting the photographic details of Sameshima’s photographs, as alluded to in his cleverly chosen title In Between Days (Without You). Literally read, the title In Between Days simply defines a period of time (of days gone by or days approaching), but I would like to suggest that it also evokes movement and instability across its different referents. The phrasing as well as the reading of his photographs permits no resolution or closure of its elements either spatially or temporally. Photography’s privileged relation to melancholia is in part one of temporality. More specifically, the freezing of time creates a dimension in which the future perfect of the photographic image—this will-have-been— may be suspended, manipulated, and reworked to become the past perfected.37 The future or becoming of Sameshima’s photographs lies in its future tense, the “speaking” of an action that has not yet occurred or is not yet in existence. I locate Sameshima’s photographs within the interstices between the past and the future. That is, Sameshima’s photographs simultaneously proffer and defer a promise of resolution. The present is enacted by the viewer’s engagement with the photographs. The parentheses around “Without You” serve as a qualifying remark about the lost object but also serve as a break, a performative digression. Correspondingly, the parenthetical “Without You” can also be read to signify a list of interchangeable names, including literally you, the viewer. The desire of the viewer becomes the subject of the photographs while the viewer’s engagement with Sameshima’s photographs sutures loss into lack.

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Sameshima’s photographs force the observer to circulate back and forth like the anonymous bodies between the points of gazing and being gazed at. At the same time they provoke ambivalence and leave bodies adrift in a liminal domain that eloquently manifests the paradox defining mourning and melancholia. As Leo Bersani (quoting Lacan) insightfully notes, “The sacrifice of being is the price we pay when we enter language, when we become creatures who have meaning.”38 Desire is grounded in loss.

Now loss, cruel as it may be, cannot do anything against possession: it completes it, if you wish, it affirms it. It is not, at bottom, but a second acquisition— this time wholly internal—and equally intense. (Rilke)39

For Vo, the lost object is that of being itself. Similar to Sameshima’s works, Vo’s April 25, 1975 (resonance) bears the constituent intangible trace of a psychic life in and through the quotidian and the obvious. In April 25, 1975 (resonance), Vo asserts his identity to make his intentions clearly known. He negotiates and exploits the politics of multiculturalism by anticipating a misrecognition of his “refugee” space as a natural extension of himself, creating a slippage between the viewer addressing Vo the artist interchangeably with the installation itself. Vo fled Saigon on April 25, 1975. Officially, 1975 marked the year when 150,000 South Vietnamese emigrated to the United States because of fears of retaliation by the Communist Vietcong. His work is part of a national project that Lisa Lowe describes as the “re-membering” of the Vietnam War—who its heroes were, who must be forgotten, and who may mourn. Just as Sameshima’s photographs depend on a viewer to “animate” his images in order to go to a more complex level; Vo’s installation April 25, 1975 (resonance) relies on the viewer to “activate” the space through spatial extension and temporal immediacy. Both rely on the process of incorporation to unfold an existence of the unreal that makes an attempt to substitute and appropriate a loss. On another level, rather than defer the possibility of a double loss, this space effects a kind of commerce in which Vo not only exchanges with the viewer the psychic “burden” of departure and displacement but also accepts in exchange the lost object as paradoxically “possessed and lost at the same time.”40 In April 25, 1975 (resonance) Vo first covers the gallery’s floor with a layer of Sheetrock, then a layer of cardboard. He then proceeds to place a series of found objects—clothes, a bicycle, a picture frame, a rice paddy hat— along the installation space, taping them down and covering them entirely with long strips of packing tape. One’s first impression upon entering the space is of the raised floor and the mutating patterns, the flowing lines of packing tape that seem to continue beyond the gallery wall. The viewer

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Khanh Vo, April 25, 1975 (resonance), 1995, installation detail, bicycle (courtesy of the artist)

walks on and negotiates around what Vo designates as a “refugee space,” a place of survival and transient homelessness. With attention paid to the signifiers “refugee” and “homelessness,” Vo’s installation connotes not only a landscape of loss but also a condition of failed amnesia. On one level, April 25, 1975 (resonance) gestures toward an attempt to take refuge in the gallery’s corners, to make a temporary home, producing a momentary repose of immobility. On another level, the repeated patterns of the packing tape along the floor, the mummification of each object, the inherent qualities and function of his materials of tape and cardboard (the idea that one is ready to pack up and move quickly only to do it again), and the parentheses around the title resonance replay a traumatic memory of painful evacuation and perpetual displacement. In April 25, 1975 (resonance) the manifestation of a failed amnesia becomes externalized, a re-presentation of a psychic topography that encrypts and preserves a lost object. As with Sameshima, it is important to focus again on the process of incorporation, specifically, Vo’s reinvestment of the lost object and its externalization through substitution and psychical transference. As Sameshima does, Vo pays attention to domestic details, creating a sanctuary of the mundane and the banal. Through his spare and subtle presentation, Vo makes the most of his found objects, which allude to the halfremembered and unattended memories that inhabit everyday life. Playing

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with scale insofar as the viewer must enter into and onto the installation, Vo invites the physical presence of the viewer, less for him or her to complete the work or to find resolution than to create incoherence. An observer’s identification with a work of art is usually made a priori, before his or her engagement with it. That is, no viewer approaches a work with a blank mind; rather, one always has a sense of having gotten there by a certain exhibitionary route. The understated power of Vo’s artistic strategy is its anticipation of the intuitive capabilities of the viewer to produce a place that sets in motion metaphorical and metonymic associations. By making the viewer negotiate his or her way around objects, which also function as obstacles, and by arresting the familiar, Vo forces the viewer to pause, to falter. A pair of sandals, a picture frame, a bicycle are transformed into complex and charged mnemonic devices that force the viewer to ponder the relationship between Vo, his history, and the scattered objects. A double valence unfolds and reverberates in the uncluttered yet opaque objects of the installation. The mummified, almost invisible objects are not yet signs or empty vessels but a contestation, a renegotiation and modification of signifying bonds. In other words, their readable opaqueness (you know it’s an outline of a frame, but you cannot see the frame directly) encourages symbolic replacements that are transformative in nature; the objects begin to lose strictly personal significance. As the viewer begins to interact with the various objects, the landscape of April 25, 1975 (resonance) begins to exceed the material world of Vo’s personal relationship to the space. The objects covered up by packing tape metaphorically serve as replaceable items that can be psychically exchanged between Vo and the viewer. Paradoxically for Vo, the entire process results in the simultaneous possession and loss of the lost object—a lost object that “appears” to be lost but is in fact staged. At the end of the mourning after, Vo’s installation is ripped off the floor, packed up, and thrown away. In Stanzas, in an image corresponding to the scattered imagery of April 25, 1975 (resonance), Agamben describes the objects surrounding Dürer’s angel in his engraving Melencolia I (1517)—the compass, the sphere, the millstone, the hammer, the scales, and the straightedge—as emptied of their habitual meaning, having no other significance than the space they weave during the epiphany of the unattainable.41 The scattered tools of logic are of no use to the melancholic who cannot conceive the incorporeal, as the angel has no sense of scale and time, connoted by these very objects. Recalling Agamben’s conceptualization of incorporation as a turning away from reality, a turning away from perception, from the real, we see that the unreal object(s) of melancholy introjection become no longer a phantasm and not yet a sign. Two different spaces emerge in the transformation of the objects: for the observer it is a complicated return to the

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real, the material, and for Vo, an intermediate epiphanic place, located in the no-man’s-land between narcissistic self-love and external object-choice (a place that I will discuss in the conclusion of this essay). The space of the former evokes for the observer an identification with the work that forces the viewer to negotiate the very ground of his or her experience in conjunction with Vo’s installation. Vo’s April 25, 1975 (resonance) is a point in time, an exact date of departure, etched temporally onto the floor of the gallery. The year 1975 signifies the fall of Saigon, a period of time often forgotten in the United States. Such a repression of history and memory elides the painful and violent repercussions of a war that displaced thousands of Vietnamese. The national project of “re-membering” Vietnam manifests itself mainly within popular culture through hypermasculinized literary and filmic narratives of soldiers who fought in Vietnam.42 However, the mourning of Vietnamese refugees and exiles is dealt with infrequently or surreptitiously. Marked as refugees, Vietnamese Americans, since their arrival in the United States beginning in 1975, have been forced into a prescriptive model and social type. Conventionally, refugees are seen as persons who are forced to flee their homeland because their lives are threatened by political, religious, or genocidal forces. The anguish that comes from being forced away from one’s homeland is recognized, in turn, within an all-encompassing or homogeneous U.S. narrative of Vietnamese Americans as objects of sympathy, incapacitated by grief and therefore in need of care and assistance, whether by a well-meaning American GI, a Christian family located in the Midwest, a social worker in an urban city, or a liberal anthropologist or sociologist. Rather than being held accountable to the trauma and tragedy of the Vietnam War, tales of assimilation and living the American Dream by and about Vietnamese Americans are promoted to fit within narratives of U.S. citizenship and history. The highlighting of such individual tales of success not only assumes a collective voice but also presumes a sense of agency in the control of one’s destiny and the ability to mourn the trauma of being forced to leave one’s homeland. For all the blurred lines between mourning and melancholia in relation to temporality or to the order of the two (which comes first—melancholia or mourning?), Freud names the testing of reality as one of the distinctive phases of mourning that separates it from melancholia. As he writes, “[In] mourning time is needed for the command of reality-testing to be carried out in detail, and . . . when this work has been accomplished the ego will have succeeded in freeing its libido from the lost object.”43 For Freud, the “work” of mourning (Trauerarbeit) consists of bringing to consciousness memories of the lost object “bit by bit.”44 April 25, 1975 (resonance) seems to invite a collective mourning “bit by bit” if we metaphorically view this installation as a whole, as an open sore

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of pain and homelessness. By inviting the observer to renegotiate the objects physically and psychologically, Vo reinvests the lost object in the realm of the social. On one level, the sharing of melancholia is already in place in April 25, 1975 (resonance), as indicated by the appended label next to his “title,” which acknowledges names of friends who assisted him in installing the piece. On another level, the initial solitude that April 25, 1975 summons is continually interrupted by the arrival of others at the installation, others whose presence makes manifest the resonance of this “public” space as a sanctuary to remember. Following a tradition of installation and conceptual art practices, Vo’s installation not only challenges the idea of the ingenious and individual artist but also engages in an exhibitionary politics of seeing and being seen. To experience Vo’s work while walking on the installation itself simultaneously places the observer as part of the observed. The psychic project of mourning April 25, 1975 (resonance) seems underway. Yet the mourning of loss is never really resolved in April 25, 1975 (resonance) or in the photographs of Sameshima. To engage with Sameshima’s or Vo’s works of art does not enact the possibility of recognizing the other in the self, nor does it elucidate the constitution of the lost object. Rather, their works allude to a tale of melancholy and loss that needs to be known but not necessarily seen. To conclude, I would like to take into account not only their work together but also the context in which these works were framed as well as the historical moment in which the exhibition took place. When an observer enters an exhibition, he or she is not just looking at the work itself but taking in what Tony Bennett calls the extradiscursive elements that surround the work—the exhibitionary space itself, invitation, wall text, catalog essay, labels, reviews, and so on. Sameshima’s and Vo’s works are devoid of any visual markers of race, yet it’s obvious that their names as well as the content of their work complicate the notion and ambivalence of difference. Within an era of multiculturalism (or postmulticulturalism), works by minority artists are still seen within narrow frameworks of authenticity (Asianness, for example) and race. Although these elements of analysis are useful and in some cases crucial, more likely than not, these works are given short shift, and a deeper interpretation of them is lost. From another perspective the works’ gesture toward difference within the context of mourning and melancholia reveals narratives unseen, unheard, and unknown. Anne Cheng’s recent book Melancholy of Race provides insight into how incidents of racial discrimination and disenfranchisement are sublimated, repressed, and marginalized within narratives of U.S. citizenship. The psychical injuries endured and denied through narratives of exclusion and assimilation not only foreclose or make a racialized minority’s grief and grievance unrecognizable but also lead to what she calls a racial melancholia. She writes that “the racially melancholic minority is doubly versed in

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the art of losing. The racially denigrated person has to forfeit the full security of his/her imaginary integrity . . . but then is forced to take in (rather than project that lack to another) and reidentify with that loss: a double loss. These layered losses for the racialized subject are then sanctioned, both legally and culturally.”45 Sameshima’s and Vo’s art defies a double loss through their conceptual strategies of absence and presence. Moreover, their conceptual framework and cleverly scripted titles gesture toward, but also deny, complete identification with the work. Their work is useful in thinking of ways in which melancholia as “an intention to mourn that precedes and anticipates the loss of the object” can transform from an immobile and static condition into a production of becoming.46

Right before the opening of the mourning after, an event in Little Saigon (Garden Grove, California) erupted, making more poignant and salient the timing of Vo’s installation. A video-store merchant, Truong Van Tran, displayed a Vietnamese flag and a photograph of Ho Chi Minh in his store, not only inflaming nationalist and anticommunist sentiments but also bringing forth painful memories of a war and emigration that had seemed left behind. The onslaught of passion and anger erupted through many massive protests, parades, and press conferences, making headlines in the Los Angeles Times and attracting local news coverage. Moreover, the event galvanized a community, making its presence known, but it also exposed a melancholic wound that the process of acculturation or prescription for refugee suffering and displacement could not heal. April 25, 1975 (resonance) and the spontaneous gathering of outrage and protest in Little Saigon point to the inadequacy and the impossibility of fully representing the trauma and the experience of displacement and rejection during that initial departure in 1975. Yet for Vo, the choice of materials and the ability to install the work again and again endorse the belief in the power of the image instead of abandoning it. The possibility of repeatedly enacting April 25, 1975 (resonance) points to a moving forward to another reality that Agamben describes as beyond the material and the psychical. The artist becomes not the Renaissance masculinist hero whose poems suture desire and lack but what Agamben refers to as the “custodian of the inaccessible.” He grows to be the framer of the unbearable and the unattainable “at the limit of an essential psychic risk . . . in an artistic practice what would otherwise be impossible to be seized or known.”47 At the same time, the lost object’s return to the social creates a ripplelike effect that remains to be seen. At the beginning of this essay, I invoked the scholarship of Lisa Lowe and her conceptualization of the repressed narrative of Vietnam in relation to the nation and U.S. citizenship. Part of her

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larger project in Immigrant Acts is to figure the traumas of Asian America, for example, the Vietnam War experienced by Vietnamese Americans, “[their] images, memories, and narratives—submerged, fragmented, and sedimented in a historical U.S. unconscious,”48 as re-presented within the site of Asian American culture. Rather than limit ourselves to a definition of melancholia as lack or experiencing a double loss, let us conclude with the visions of Lowe and Agamben in order to view melancholia as becoming, as a production of space where contemporary art such as Dean Sameshima’s and Khanh Vo’s works in parallax ways to provoke different forms of identification that may shift the psychical process underlying subject formation and the topology of culture.

NOTES

1. Seth Mydans, “A Resurrected Picture of the Vietnam War, from the Other Side,” New York Times, April 19, 2000 (internet version: http://www.nytimes.com/ library/world/asia/041900/vietnam-photos.html). 2. Subsequently this is how I learned about the photograph. 3. Khanh Vo, “artist statement,” given to me by the artist on May 11, 1998. 4. Khanh Vo, April 25, 1975 (resonance), 1995, mixed media installation: brown packing tape, found objects, drywall boards, dimensions variable. 5. Thanks to David Eng for this apt description of Vo’s installation as a nuclear meltdown. 6. Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 4. 7. Dean Sameshima, In Between Days (Without You), 1998, C-prints, each eight by ten inches (fifteen photographs). 8. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), 243–58. On p. 244, Freud writes, “This picture becomes a little more intelligible when we consider that, with one exception, the same traits are met with in mourning. . . . It is really only because we know so well how to explain it [mourning] that this attitude does not seem to us pathological.” 9. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 256. 10. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, trans. Joan Rivière, ed. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1960), 16. 11. Freud’s breakdown of the topography of the mind, as stated, is id, ego, and superego. Simply put, the id represents human drives and desires, the ego becomes the organized part of this mental structure, and the superego develops as the protector and critic of this ego. 12. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 256. 13. Judith Butler, “Melancholy Gender/Refused Identification,” in The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 141. 14. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Sigmund Freud defines the death drive as a tendency to return to an inorganic state and homeostasis in opposition to an

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erotic principle of discharge and union (Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. and ed. James Strachey [New York: W. W. Norton, 1961]). 15. Giorgio Agamben, “The Lost Object,” in Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Ronald L. Martinez (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 20. 16. Agamben, “The Lost Object,” 21. 17. See Juliana Schiesari, “The Gendering of Freud’s ‘Mourning and Melancholia’” (chapter 1), and “Black Humor? Gender and Genius in the Melancholic Tradition” (chapter 2), in The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992). 18. For example, Agamben looks at the troubadour lyric poets of the dolce stil novo (sweet new style) as well as philosophers Aristotle, Ficino, and others. 19. Butler, “Melancholy Gender/Refused Identification,” 133. 20. Diana Fuss, Identification Papers (New York: Routledge, 1995), 3. 21. Judith Butler, “Melancholy Gender/Refused Identification,” 146. 22. Judith Butler, “Reply to Adam Phillip’s Commentary on ‘Melancholy Gender/Refused Identification,’” in The Psychic Life of Power, 162. 23. Butler, “Reply to Adam Phillip’s Commentary,” 161. 24. Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia, 40. 25. This information was contained in the catalog of the mourning after. For a curator, the exhibitionary experience is a manifold one that does not end when a viewer leaves an exhibition and the gallery. Although it was presumptuous on my part to assume the viewer would read the placard before entering the exhibition or the catalog during the viewing of the art or even after leaving the gallery, I didn’t feel it was necessary to provide too much textual context alongside the work. Instead, I consistently placed the following on a label next to each individual work: the artist’s name, title, and date. Sameshima made it known to me during our studio visits and phone and e-mail exchanges that the viewer did not need to know these beds were in a gay sex club. From an e-mail correspondence dated on April 24, 2000, Sameshima wrote that such information need not be foregrounded, because his modus operandi of speaking in “codes” paralleled Barthes’s preface to Ticks, by Renaud Camus, insofar as the novel “speak[s] homosexuality without speaking about it.” 26. The title is inspired by the Cure’s song “Inbetween Days” from their album Head on the Door (1985). Sameshima added “(Without You),” which will be noted at the conclusion of this essay. Here are some of the lyrics: “Yesterday I got so old I felt like I could die, yesterday I got so old it made me want to cry . . . yesterday away from you, it froze me deep inside . . . go on go on just walk away, go on go on your choice is made . . . go on go on and disappear, go on go on away from here.” 27. Using different colored lightbulbs and Agfa Ultra 50 film, a slow, highly saturated film, Sameshima shot the images without a flash, enabling what he calls a slight exaggeration or extra tint in the colors. 28. Emphasizing that melancholia is not a voluntary condition, Butler poses this question: What circumstances and prohibitions demand the loss of certain kinds of attachments that are disavowed and thus cannot be grieved? She focuses specifically on how gender identifications are formed through a melancholy resulting from prohibitions against homosexuality that force one to give up same-sex desire. Mel-

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ancholia is less a prolonged refusal to grieve than a preemption of grief performed in the absence of culturally instituted conventions and mores. Loss is not warranted or wanted, and the melancholic has no other purpose but to withdraw and make viable an appropriation where none is really possible. 29. Giorgio Agamben, “The Noonday Demon,” in Stanzas, 7. 30. Susan Stewart, “Objects of Desire,” in On Longing (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 137–38. 31. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 51. 32. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 21 33. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 26, 55. 34. Christian Metz, “Photography and Fetish,” in The Critical Image, ed. Carol Squiers (Seattle: Bay Press, 1990), 161. 35. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 55. 36. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 77. 37. Carole-Anne Tyler, “Passing: Narcissism, Identity and Difference,” differences 6, nos. 2–3 (1994): 215. 38. Leo Bersani, “Sociality and Sexuality,” Critical Inquiry 26, no. 4 (summer 2000): 649. 39. Cited as an epigraph in Agamben, Stanzas, 1. 40. Agamben, “The Lost Object,” 21. 41. Agamben, “The Phantasms of Eros,” 26. 42. I am thinking here of cultural productions from the 1970s and beyond, including such television series as M*A*S*H and China Beach and such feature films as The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, Platoon, and Rambo, which have garnered national attention and popular culture status. The exception to this hypermasculinized reaction would be the controversial embrace of Maya Lin’s Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C. 43. Freud, “Morning and Melancholia,” 252. 44. Freud, “Morning and Melancholia,” 256. 45. Anne Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 175. 46. Quotation from Agamben, “The Lost Object,” 20. 47. Agamben, “The Phantasms of Eros,” 26. 48. Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 12.

Vilashini Cooppan

Mourning Becomes Kitsch The Aesthetics of Loss in Severo Sarduy’s Cobra

Severo Sarduy’s 1972 novel Cobra is an expatriate fiction, notable less for the controversial status of its author’s claim to Cuban identity (all expatriates wear their nationalism uncomfortably) than for the irreverence, even unrecognizability, of its national nostalgia. Cobra is a novel of national longing that abjures the backward gaze of sentiment altogether, from a mocking introductory footnote that warns readers not to expect a sweeping historical saga in the tradition of the Latin American novels of the “boom” to an overall style whose nouveau Romanesque resistant opacity is rivaled only by the near unreadability of the novel’s thematics. A wildly experimental novel on every level, Cobra boasts an elusive plot whose twists and turns wittily parody the Lacanian theory of the subject, a cast of continually metamorphosing characters (Cuban drag queens, itinerant Tibetan monks, false Indian gurus), and a distinctly Orientalist imaginary. But for all its stylistic insolence, Cobra remains a novel of mourning. According to Freud, the psychic state of mourning represents “the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as fatherland, liberty, an ideal.” Libidinal attachment gradually withdraws from a lost object, which nonetheless continues to exist in the mind.1 In contrast to the inward-directed collapse of the ego that characterizes melancholia’s response to unconscious loss, mourning’s efforts to free the ego for reattachment turn on a logic of displacement that I will argue is central to Sarduy’s project. Cobra’s transvestite Cuban bodies, like its imaginary India of celluloid deities and fake mystics, offer pointedly artificial, abundantly theatrical, partial, and displaced compensation for two distinct orders of loss: first, the loss through exile of Sarduy’s native Cuba; and second, the loss of a foundationalist discourse of national representation in which nation and culture, gender 251

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and ethnicity, are fixed quantities and firm anchors. Between the lost nation and its surrogate objects there is no easy one-to-one correspondence. Indeed, analogical readings quickly recede in a novel that finds its most pervasive model in anamorphosis, that species of visual distortion in which an object’s recognition or restoration rests contingent on the viewer’s displacement. Cobra’s transformation of anamorphosis into literary device allows the transvestite body and the Orientalized space to serve as the ironic answers to the expatriate’s perennial question, What is home? Cuba’s veiled appearance in unexpected places disrupts both the possibility of an unmediated return to the native land and the broader cultural politics of authenticity within which the dialectic of exile and return operates. In their place, Sarduy sets up a precarious politics of cultural representation that does not seek to restore loss so much as to turn loss into a particular kind of aesthetic, in which artifice triumphs over authenticity and libidinal displacement transforms the politics of place. COBR A’S ROOTS AND ROUTES

Sarduy began his life away from Cuba in 1960, when he went to Paris to study painting and art history on a scholarship from the new revolutionary government. During the 1960s, when Havana was attracting dissident intellectuals from throughout the hemisphere, staging international cultural festivals and literary prizes, and becoming a vibrant center for cultural politics in the Americas, Sarduy remained in Paris.2 He adopted French citizenship in 1967 and went on to cultivate a career as a prolific novelist, playwright, painter, and theorist with widespread roots in French poststructuralism and psychoanalysis, Tibetan Buddhism and quantum physics. It is not too much to say that Cobra and its author existed at a kind of interpretive, as well as geographic, crossroads. Prominent members of the avant-garde Parisian journal Tel quel celebrated Cobra as the poststructuralist novel par excellence, marked by an eroticized textuality that none knew better how to describe than Sarduy’s longtime teacher and mentor, Roland Barthes. Cobra, wrote Barthes, “is in fact a paradisiac text, utopian (without site), a heterology by plenitude . . . a kind of Franciscanism [that] invites all words to perch, to flock, to fly off again . . . Cobra is the pledge of continuous jubilation, the moment when by its very excess verbal pleasure chokes and reels into bliss.”3 Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the revolutionary Cuban intellectual and critic Roberto Fernández Retamar excoriated Sarduy as “el mariposeo neobarthesiano [the neobarthesian homosexual].”4 Poststructuralist praise for Cobra’s siteless “verbal pleasure” contrasts both the nationalist orthodoxy of Fernández Retamar, which placed Cobra and Sarduy firmly outside Cuba, and more recent critical interpretations, which found Cuba very much within Cobra, anagrammatically

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hidden in the novel’s title and undeniably present in thematics that both instantiate and deconstruct the search for a national origin.5 In an interview given in the late 1960s Sarduy announced, in the spirit of the critical times, the absence of anything other than relations among texts, the primacy of repetition and plagiarism, and the fundamental impossibility of origin: “nada precede, nada es primero ni verdadero. No hay origen [nothing precedes, nothing is first or true. There is no origin].”6 For Sarduy’s compatriot Fernández Retamar and the nineteenth-century Cuban nationalist José Martí, however, the quest for origins and its accompanying faith in the autochthonous were central tenets of their emancipatory visions. In his 1971 essay Caliban Fernández Retamar called on Latin Americans to curse the Prospero to the north and break the cycle of dependency that had made their culture little more than “un aprendizaje, un borrador o una copia de la cultura burguesa europa [an apprenticeship, a rough draft, or a copy of European bourgeois culture].”7 Similarly, Martí’s 1891 essay “Nuestra América” (Our America) despised Latin America as a “masquerade” of a continent, “con los calzones de Inglaterra, el chaleco parisiense, el chaquetón de Norteamérica y la montera de España [with English breeches, Parisian vest, North American jacket, and Spanish cap].” Against this patchwork of foreign models, Martí proclaimed the birth of “el hombre real [the real man].” “El libro importado ha sido vencido en América por el hombre natural [The imported book has been conquered in America by the natural man].”8 If Fernández Retamar and Martí protested imitation as a kind of continental enslavement, Sarduy celebrates mimetic desire and the ideology of the fake as the only modes through which national and cultural identities may be lived or narrated. Sarduy belongs to a larger, distinctly postmodern, tradition of Latin American writers (Alejo Carpentier and José Lezama Lima in Cuba, Luis Rafael Sánchez in Puerto Rico, Augusto Roa Bastos in Paraguay, Manuel Puig in Argentina, and Mario Vargas Llosa in Peru) who employ the “metalanguage of kitsch” in order to express the heterogeneity of contemporary culture.9 Sarduy’s Cobra explodes Latin American cultural theory’s governing paradigm of the search for a unique, authentic, organic continental identity. It presents instead a world utterly devoid of real or natural men and peopled only by a dizzying array of proliferating, mutating, visibly constructed identities. The novel’s eponymous protagonist, a male-to-female transvestite dancer in a Havana theater who longs to be a woman, undergoes a series of transformations whose progress must pass for plot. In the course of various meticulously detailed attempts to reduce the size of his/her10 rather masculine feet, Cobra concocts a drug so potent that it splinters him/her along with the Señora or Madam of the theater into two versions of themselves, one full size and one dwarfed. The full-size Señora and the theater’s costume designer travel to India in search of exotic props with

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which to stage a new production, a Féerie Orientale replete with inflatable Buddhas, celluloid elephants, an array of silks and saris, electric sitars, and “un montículo de pacotilla india [a mound of Indian kitsch].”11 Upon the Señora’s return to Havana, Cobra departs for India, ostensibly to copy motifs from erotic temple art for his/her interpretation of the starring role in the Féerie Orientale. During Cobra’s absence, the Señora struggles mightily to stretch, twist, or otherwise enlarge the dwarf version of Cobra, named Pup, to a size suitable for stage appearances. The full-size Cobra returns to the Havana theater only to leave again for Tangiers with Pup and the Señora in tow. There, in a sex-change operation that parodically literalizes psychoanalytic transference, Cobra loses a penis while the dwarf double Pup fatally gains all the pain of the operation. The postoperative Cobra appears in the text in both female and male guise: as an ornately painted, hardly human woman who runs terrified through the Paris metro and as a man who falls in with an American motorcycle gang who frequent a Parisian leather bar where they practice tantric rituals and sell drugs. At the leather bar arrives a jaded Indian guru who announces, “No viajo en elefante sino en jet [I travel by jet, not by elephant]” (178/101). He continues to surprise, seducing a disciple in the men’s room and dispensing cryptic and clichéd words of enlightenment to his audience of spiritual seekers before disappearing. After undergoing a ritual initiation ceremony into the motorcycle gang, Cobra is killed by a half human, half bird narcotics officer. The gang members perform ancient funeral rites from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, subjecting Cobra’s body to transformative rituals of embalming, purification, pacification, and cremation while also providing a funeral feast of take-out deli food and hash brownies to all comers. The final section of the novel returns to a moment in which Cobra is still alive, albeit transformed along with the rest of the gang into the very same group of Tibetan lamas who have appeared earlier in the novel, exiled from their homeland by the Chinese occupying army and engaged on a mission to convey their Living Buddha to a great monastery in Lassa. The gang members–turned–monks journey through a richly, almost hypnotically, described India, encounter the Grand Lama, who has only impenetrable advice and black-market religious artifacts to give them, and finally reach Tibet, which they find snow-covered and desolate, its monasteries abandoned and its gods vanished, in a final variation on the theme “you can’t go home again.” As Emir Rodríguez Monegal has pointed out, both Sarduy’s “topoi” of transvestites, erotic theaters, and carnivals and his narrative “procedimientos [methods]” take metamorphosis as their model.12 As fixed notions of national, cultural, and gender identity self-destruct in Sarduy’s work, his texts become (or so it seems to us) unreadable, difficult, confusing. Readerly frustration confirms the definitional force with which nation, culture,

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and gender interpellate human beings as subjects and readers. Jorge Aguilar Mora has spoken of the presence in Cobra of “una conciencia de la destrucción de una forma novelística [an awareness of the destruction of novelistic form].”13 Bereft of the history, organicism, and myth so central to the Latin American novel from the novela de la tierra to magical realism and unwilling to ascribe to the notion of an originary mimetic compact between the nation and the novel form, Cobra wrenches nationalist representation out of that discourse of origins that reconsolidates the nation with every telling. Cobra’s alternative order of nationalist representation is less a discourse than an aesthetic, less concerned with the restoration or reproduction of the nation through myth than with the emblematization of national loss.

THE ONTOLOGY OF EXILE AND THE PSYCHOANALYSIS OF RETURN

Al distanciarme de Cuba comprendí qué era Cuba o al menos me planté con toda claridad la pregunta: “¿Qué es Cuba?” . . . Cuando quedó lejos, pudé empezar a plantearme esa pregunta, que es la que poco a poco ha centrado mi trabajo. A saber: cuáles son las posibilidades, diría de un modo un poco presuntuoso, las posibilidades ontológicas, las posibilidades de ser de mi país.14 When I distanced myself from Cuba, I understood what Cuba was or, at the very least, I posed myself the question “What is Cuba?” . . . When I was far away, I could begin to formulate this question, the one on which my work has gradually come to center. What I want to know is what are the possibilities, let me dare to say the ontological possibilities, of being from my country.

In this 1966 interview, Sarduy gives a haunting account of the questions about selfhood and nationhood that exile calls into being and the imperatives that exile exacts. Though writing from Paris at this time, Sarduy associates his task with that of other Cubans writing in the wake of the revolution, in response to what he calls “un orden inquisitivo sobre qué somos los cubanos. Sobre qué es ‘la cubanidad’ [an inquisitive imperative as to what Cubans are. As to what ‘Cubanness’ is].”15 Ultimately, Sarduy’s writing of “la cubanidad ” does not answer the question of identity any more than his emigration from Cuba evaded that question. Migration displaces the nation even as it rewrites it; Sarduy goes to Paris in order to ask himself a whole string of questions: ¿Qué somos los cubanos? (What are we Cubans?) ¿Qué es “la cubanidad”? (What is Cubanness?) ¿Qué es lo cubano? (What is the Cuban?) ¿Qué es Cuba? (What is Cuba?) Cuba is lost to Sarduy by virtue of his exile, but the nation and national culture are also always lacking in some deeper sense, always invented or imagined over the traumas of history and therefore always open to becoming the objects of a distinctly

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fetishistic gaze elsewhere. If the classically Freudian fetishistic gaze attempts to comfort, papering over the traumatic apprehension of female lack with the erotic plenitude of a substitute object, the displacing gaze that Sarduy trains on the missing nation is designed to unsettle. Sarduy’s attempt to turn exile’s ontology (being away) into exile’s epistemology (seeing and knowing an object from a distance) takes its point of departure from Lacan’s discussion in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis of Hans Holbein’s sixteenth-century painting The Ambassadors. The secret of this painting lies in the moment when, moving away or, as Slavoj Zizek puts it, “looking awry,” the viewer sees the spot in the painting’s foreground revealed as a skull.16 In that moment, writes Lacan, we are brought face to face with “our own nothingness,” handed an “imaged embodiment” of our castration in the domain of the visual.17 The viewing subject of The Ambassadors stands annihilated before the “dazzling and spread out” function of the gaze. For what the subject realizes is that “the gaze is outside, I am looked at, that is to say, I am a picture.”18 What Lacan terms the painting’s “capture” of the subject reveals both the fundamental lack of a being whose eye sees only from one point but who is looked at from all sides, and the ceaseless circuitry of such a being’s desire. The subject oscillates between the unthinkable place in which it is fixed (object of the gaze, sadly limited by its organ of perception, coincident with the skull’s vanishing point) and the place in which it wishes to be (agent of the gaze, master of the visual domain, owner of all it surveys).19 Insofar as the gaze has what the subject does not, the gaze serves as what Lacan calls objet a, that object from which the subject has been separated and which therefore comes to symbolize the central lack of desire. As Zizek points out, it is not that objet a is lacking but rather that objet a, “in its very positivity, gives body to a lack.” It is a Kantian “negative magnitude,” a “mere positivization of a void,” a “something that stands for nothing”—the nothing of the desiring subject.20 Sarduy effectively translates Lacan’s theory of the gaze onto the terrain of national subjectivity and posits Cuba as a version of objet a. Sarduy’s Cuba embodies the structural lack of national desire, which longs for a homeland that simply is not there. As objet a, the nation operates as Zizek’s sublime object of ideology, “the spectral object which has no positive ontological consistency, but merely fills in the gap of a certain constitutive impossibility.”21 Whether physically absent as a consequence of Sarduy’s exile or ontologically uncertain (what might the undifferentiated singularity of “la cubanidad” or “Cubanness” mean in the context of Cuba’s heterogeneous mix of Spanish, African, and Chinese peoples?), Cuba for Sarduy exists precisely in the realm of “constitutive impossibility.” Always lacking, ever present, a stopgap that, if it fills in the lack of national being, does so only on the terms of imminent and perpetual replacement. For Sarduy, what he

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calls the “ontological possibilities” of being Cuban ultimately depend on a certain deontologization of Cuba, that is, a willingness to think the nation by means of a detour through an altogether different concept of being, grounded on the level not of what is but of what seems to be. Sarduy’s overall project “looks awry” at identities of all kinds (national, cultural, gendered, sexual) from the doubly distant perspectives of voluntary exile and camp sensibility. “To perceive Camp in objects and persons,” writes Susan Sontag, “is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.”22 Cobra offers a wholly camp account of Cuban being, from the novel’s opening in Havana’s Teatro Lírico de Muñecas [Lyrical Theater of Dolls] through its chronicling of multiple mutations and constant peregrinations to its conclusion on the phantasmatic terrain of a heavily Orientalized India and Tibet. In a 1984 interview Sarduy notes the “incapacidad del cubano para abordar frontalmente el tema de lo nacional [inability of the Cuban to come head-on at the idea of the national]” and proposes the following solution: “convertir el discurso sobre lo cubano en una verdadera anamorfosis, es decir, no se ve nada frontalmente, se ve todo marginal, tangencialmente [to convert the discourse on the Cuban into a real anamorphosis, that is to say, one in which nothing is seen head-on and everything is seen marginally, tangentially].”23 If anamorphosis is Sarduy’s term for a national identification that can be grasped only from its edges, then Cobra’s constantly shifting parade of partial identities presents anamorphosis in literary form. Cobra’s incessant displacement of the nation through the thematics of metamorphosis and the aesthetic of camp captures the essence of Sarduy’s vision of an anamorphic reading practice. The fullest exposition of such a practice can be found in the theoretical speculations of La simulación (1982). Commenting on The Ambassadors, Sarduy rejects the simple binary opposition of different vantage points (spot vs. skull, front view vs. tangential view). Instead, he proposes a focus on the excessive, in his terminology baroque, energy that operates between spot and skull, converting the one into the other and back again in an endless circuit of decipherment.24 Transposed into the textual thematics of Cobra, the principle of anamorphic reading allows us to understand the novel’s own conversion of its most visible material into the mirror image of an absent Cuba. The Cuba that Sarduy tells us stands behind his each and every act of writing comes into focus as the lost object, the objet a, only in its continual refraction through something else, whether that something be the transvestite body, India, Tibet, Lacanian psychoanalysis, formal experimentalism, or any of the myriad other things with which Cobra abounds and from which a certain bricolage-like idea of Cuba rebounds. As national idea, Cuba holds out the promise of territorial location and cultural patrimony. What Cobra does is to reveal those somethings as nothing, territorial loca-

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tion as transnational dislocation, cultural patrimony as the wildly syncretic fusion of persons and places, genders and nations, all of which seem to dissolve on contact with one another. Beneath the naturalized surface of motherland and patria, Sarduy exposes gender and nation not as the “musthave” elements of identity but rather as the “can’t have” and “can’t hold.”25 The spectacular metamorphoses and metaphoricity of Sarduy’s transvestite characters problematize a literal reading of gender categories, just as the transformation of a gang of American motorcyclists into Parisian hippies into exiled Tibetan lamas frustrates a literal reading of nationality. Cobra’s thematics of metamorphosis and strategy of anamorphosis interrogate the imperative to fix identity. As the icons of such identity, gender and nation are placed literally on stage and textually on the run, caught in a signifying chain whose logic is that of metonymy and displacement. The diffuse energies of Sarduy’s writing of Cuba nonetheless coalesce into a coherent project of national-cultural representation and a playful critique of Lacanian psychoanalysis. On the most obvious level, Cobra mirrors and mocks Lacan’s account of the split subject precariously yoked together by the shifting pronoun of the self. Not only does the novel chronicle the split genders of the transvestite and the cultural divisions of the cosmopolitan wanderer, but it also literally splinters Cobra off from his/ her dwarf double. However, Sarduy’s encounter with Lacan amounts to significantly more than an illustration, veering into caricature, of theory. If Lacan’s insights into the internal divisions and subjective indeterminacies of the self are underpinned by the grammar of Saussurean linguistics, Sarduy’s off-center version of Lacanian psychoanalysis relies upon what Roberto González Echevarría has called a “cultural grammar,” in which language becomes not so much a universal structure of culture as an intimate window onto the individual particularities of a given culture.26 In a 1972 interview Sarduy describes his project as a “linguistic psychoanalysis” but qualifies its difference from the Lacanian model by insisting on his foregrounding of the “very different” “unconscious mind of Spanish.” In the Spanish unconscious Sarduy claims to find “the baroque, with all the residual basis which it implies: its excesses, its extravagance, its gold/excrement, and above all, its continual flux (you can see this in the sentences in Cobra, for example). . . .”27 As an unconscious structured like a particularly ornate and excessive language, Spanish here names a culturally specific aesthetic and an especially extravagant desire that, as in the original Lacanian model, continually surpasses need. Cobra illustrates the operations of the Spanish unconscious with its thematic search for identity in which the process of looking eclipses what is found (the very definition of baroque desire), and with the semiotic excess of its sentences, which betray exactly that “overabundance” or “squandering” of signifiers, that “exacerbated code which

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devours everything,” and total saturation of information that Sarduy elsewhere deems typical of baroque language.28 Sarduy’s rethinking of the practice of linguistic psychoanalysis through the culturally inflected grammar and desire of the baroque, like his formulation of Cuba as a version of objet a, is essentially an attempt to “look awry” at Lacan, theory in the mode of anamorphosis. Tempting as it is to situate Sarduy’s injection of cultural and national specificity into the universalist frameworks of psychoanalysis as an attack on “analytic imperialism,”29 Sarduy’s relationship to Lacan evades such certainties. Ultimately, the relationship may be best considered as one of disruptive decentering. Feminist critic Ellie Ragland-Sullivan identifies as the goal of Lacan’s clinic “to place a question where an answer had previously stopped up any knowledge of lack.”30 If we could posit such a thing as “Sarduy’s clinic,” its goal might well be to replace the epistemological project of knowing the national self with an ontological question, ¿Qué es Cuba? and its deontologized answers in the form of Cobra’s mutating transvestite bodies and shifting spaces (Cuba, Tangiers, India, Tibet). I turn now to a closer examination of these dual tropes. TR ANSV ESTITES AND THE NATIONAL BODY

Transvestism, writes Marjorie Garber, functions as “a mechanism of displacement from one blurred boundary to another.” Transvestism’s movement across the boundaries that separate man from woman, self from other, renders each of those terms less autonomous, more permeable, and fundamentally uncertain. As the agent of what Garber calls “category crisis,” transvestism presents potent material for Sarduy’s project of interrogating the fixities of national and cultural identity.31 Sarduy’s use of transvestism becomes even more intriguing given his connection of the transvestite impulse to the unconscious mind of Spanish, with its baroque sensibility and its culturally specific symbolic. La simulación explicitly links transvestism to the baroque aesthetic’s tendency to exceed all given norms, whether of appearance, desire, or signification. For Sarduy, the transvestite’s “pulsión letal [fatal drive]” to simulate a woman or to give the illusion of being a woman confirms a basic drive to metamorphose, to transform, to be something other than the bounded self.32 Insofar as that drive is also undeniably baroque in form, transvestism represents at once a universal principle and a cultural particular, something very like the hispanicization of the body. If, as I will show, Cobra’s baroque writing hispanicizes the transvestite body, rendering it the equivalent of a cultural aesthetic, Cobra also nationalizes that body, turning it into the symbolic marker of a perennially lost Cuba. The painful travails of Cobra’s preoperative impersonation of feminin-

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ity—modeled, Sarduy tells us, on the male actors in the ritual theaters of Japanese Kabuki and Indian Kathakali, who spend hours transforming themselves into women who appear on stage for only a few minutes33 — entail a disparity between preparation and display that signals a desire in surplus of its satisfaction, a desire that spills over into waste, a desire that can only be baroque. Sarduy’s fascination with the transvestite as the social expression of an underlying libidinal drive to transform finds clear expression in Cobra’s description of the vigil that the Señora of the Teatro Lírico keeps over her dancers as they await the evening’s performance. Dormían todo el día, presas en aparatos y gasas, inmovilizadas por hilos, lascivas, emplastadas de cremas blancas, las mutantes. Las redes de su trayecto eran concéntricas, su paso era espiral por el ecorado barroco de los mosquiteros. Vigilaba la eclosión de sus capullos, la ruptura de la seda, el despliegue alado. (13) All day the mutants slept, imprisoned in machines and gauze, immobilized by threads, lascivious, smeared with white facial creams. The network of her route was concentric, her passage was spiral through the baroque setting of mosquito nets. She would watch over the hatching of her cocoons, the emerging of the silk, the winged unfolding. (4)

While this passage withholds subjectivity from the transvestite performers, it nonetheless endows them with the identity of artifice, the distinctly feminized identity granted to subjects who exist in order to be looked at.34 The specification of the mosquito nets under which the “mutants” sleep as “baroque” obviously refers not to the excessive ornamentation of the nets themselves but rather to the regime of desire and identity that the nets install, a regime marked, like the baroque, by the laws of libidinal and semiotic excess. These sentences themselves produce the boundarydevouring aesthetic effect of the baroque in the way in which they consciously flit between artificial and natural orders of imagery, choosing neither, saturating themselves with both. The white facial cream of artifice mixes with the natural life cycle of the butterfly, while the machinery of beauty and the protective luxury of a net designed to keep insects out are naturalized as “cocoons” awaiting the evening’s splendid unfolding.35 The discursive motility of these sentences, what Sarduy elsewhere calls their “flux,” affords a window onto the connection between the theory of the baroque and the figure of the transvestite. For if the “baroque sentence,” in Sarduy’s words, “does not lead us to a pure and simple meaning, but rather, through a series of ellipses, of zigzags, of detours, carries with it only a floating signifier—empty and polyvalent,” the transvestite is the baroque sentence in bodily form.36 Zigzagging across or border crossing male and female identity, the transvestite reveals gender’s “meaning” to be nothing other than its signification or, in Judith Butler’s influential term, its performativity.37 For Sarduy baroque language’s excess of signification repre-

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sents a compensation for those missing partial objects (the maternal breast, the gaze and the voice, the child’s excitement) that psychoanalysis tells us first constitute the self and to which the self constantly longs to return.38 Similarly, the transvestite’s excess of signification marks the spot throughout Sarduy’s writing of another missing object, equally formative of the self and just as impossible to reclaim: Cuba. By means of a complex theoretical circuit through Lacanian psychoanalysis and the theory of the baroque, gender is made to stand in for nation, the transvestite body’s transformations to represent the disintegration and deconstruction of the nation. The nation, writes Benedict Anderson, is an imagined community, but imagined as what? Discourse on the nation frequently genders its terms, from the imperial “mother” country to Orientalism’s feminized East to more recent figurations of colonialism and neocolonialism as the rape of the Third World by the First. What really happens if, as Sara Suleri expresses it, “nation is to be syncopated into body?”39 Nationalism seeks to stitch together a fragmentary history and a heterogeneous populace into the composite of the nation. Nationalist discourse traditionally covers the arbitrary invention of the nation with the borrowed clothes of gender, just as gender itself conceals its constructed nature through the enforcement of what Butler describes as a “set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being.”40 Each repetition, whether of the norms of gendered behavior or the myths of national character and national culture, only further confirms the fundamental provisionality and partiality of gender and nation, what in psychoanalytic terms we might call their lack. It is precisely this lack that Cobra seeks to narrate by syncopating Cuba into Cobra, nation into body. The novel’s focus on the constitutive division and covering artifice of the transvestite body and its anamorphic presentation of that fractured and phantasmatic body as a version of Cuban national identity seen from afar together represent a writing of loss. The loss in question is that of the desiring subject itself, a loss that cannot be restored by any singular “home,” be it the gendered body or the national topos. Far from consolidating identity, gender and nation in Cobra undo it or, rather, mirror identity’s continuous unraveling with their own. Gender is performative flux, nationality a mélange of differences, and both are suffused not by the organicism of myth but rather by the aesthetic of artificiality. NATIONAL DR AG: CUBA’S INDIAN GUISE

If the first half of Cobra anamorphically equates Cuba with Cobra, the impossibility of the exile’s lost nation with the incertitudes of the crossgendered body, the second half of the novel displaces Cuba not to a body but to a place or a series of places. Appropriately enough, part 2 of the

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novel splits off from part 1 with the scene of the character Cobra’s castration in a back-alley clinic in Tangiers. Garber explains that until the middle of the 1970s most transsexuals desiring sex-change surgery did in fact travel east, to the Casablanca clinic of Dr. Georges Burou. The contiguity of both the real and the imagined clinics speaks to the force of geographic fantasy. As conceptual hinges between Occident and Orient, Tangiers and Casablanca operate both surgically and semiotically. Castration takes place in cities rich in associations with what Garber calls “the Western fantasy of the transvestic, pan-sexualized Middle East, a place of liminality and change.”41 In Sarduy’s Orientalist imaginary, the East has an even more specific role to play as the setting for what he characterizes as a passage from one system of gender to another. Para el travestí, la docotomía y oposición de los sexos queda abolida o reducida a criterios inoportunos o arqueológicos; para el transexual, al contrario, esa oposición no solo se mantiene sino que es subrayada, aceptada; simplemente el sujeto, tomando el “corte” al pie de la letra, ha saltado del otro lado de la barra.42 For the transvestite, the dichotomy and opposition of the sexes remains abolished or reduced to archaic or archaeological criteria; for the transsexual, on the contrary, this opposition is not only maintained but highlighted, accepted; the only difference is that the subject, taking the “cut” literally, has leapt from one side of the bar to the other.

Insofar as Cobra’s “cut” in a Tangiers sex-change clinic may be seen to reconstruct the binary sexual difference in the body of the postoperative transsexual, locale becomes all important. For it falls to Tangiers, like India and Tibet, to which Tangiers leads, to offer in space what the transvestite Cobra once offered in body: a site in which binary oppositions are permeable, distinctions are impermanent, and dichotomy itself is annihilated. For Sarduy, Oriental space resembles Lacan’s Möbius strip: “esa banda retorcida sobre sí misma hace que lo interior se convierta en lo exterior y vice versa [this band twisted upon itself that converts the interior into the exterior and vice versa].”43 Sarduy’s Orient is the moment when difference disappears, when opposites convert themselves into one another, when distinction between Orient and Occident, man and woman, self and other, sacred and profane collapses in the face of a vertiginous series of interpenetrations. Cobra’s death and dismemberment, in an ancient tantric rite performed in a Parisian slum by drugged-out American motorcycliststurned-Tibetan-monks, image this collapse. The novel turns away from the static dualities of East/West and self/other and, in classic anamorphic fashion, toward what Sarduy describes as the “la energía de conversión [the energy of conversion]” operating between the terms of a binary opposition.44 The resultant portrait of a constantly mutating difference is at once

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an answer to the dilemma of cross-cultural representation and a whole new order of problem. Cobra’s constant shifts in gender and geography expose the fictitious underpinnings of foundationalist narratives that take for granted the isomorphism of identity and place, from the nationalist epic to the novela de la tierra to the novel of the “boom.” Cobra’s primary concern, in contrast, lies with transformative bliss; the bliss of the baroque’s excess, the bliss of disguise, the bliss of metamorphosis. Consistent with this concern, Sarduy’s novel rejoices in unauthorized borrowings and textual impersonations. A description of the Féerie Orientale staged in the Teatro Lírico bears the title “gustave flaubert” and mimics the minutely detailed, high Orientalist style of Flaubert’s 1862 novel Salammbô, while elsewhere there appear fragments of astronomical textbooks, Buddhist texts, the Book of Ecclesiastes, Cervantes, Góngora, Giancarlo Marmori’s Storia de vous, the journal of Christopher Columbus, and Sarduy’s previous novel De donde son los cantantes.45 For Sarduy, the Orient is itself an intertextual phenomenon, a vast conglomeration of texts that he claims to have discovered first in the work of Octavio Paz. Whether Cobra represents what González Echevarría describes as the intertextual “subconscious of Latin American literature” in which the Orient serves as privileged topic,46 or a cultural imaginary governed not by the symmetrical gaze of the self at its mirror image but by the distortions and displacements of anamorphosis, the novel’s central function remains exposure through imposture or simulation. I concentrate for the remainder of this essay on the anamorphic gaze that Cobra trains on India as the simulated image of Cuba. Insofar as simulation for Sarduy is a form of audacious representation that reveals the nonexistence of the thing that is simulated,47 Cobra’s presentation of India consigns Cuba to the realm of the fantastic and the fantasized, the impossible dream of a desire for national identity that can never be satisfied. India appears most extensively in the final section of the novel, entitled “Diario Indio” (Indian Journal) after the title of Columbus’s diary chronicling his arrival in the New World. Sarduy’s India substitutes the utopian vision of America promulgated by generations of Latin American writers with a vision of America as a mistake and a misreading, a kind of tragic anamorphosis. Columbus sailed west in order to arrive in the East and mistook the Indies of the New World for the India he would never reach. Sarduy, on the other hand, goes east to arrive in the West, to India in order to arrive (back) at Cuba.48 The “Diario Indio” section of Cobra reproduces an actual fragment of Columbus’s journal in which he records the affective tranquility and descriptive abundance of the Indies. Outside the freshly swept houses, Columbus writes: “Había perros que jamás ladraron. . . . Árboles y frutas de muy maravilloso sabor. . . . Aves y pajaritos y el cantar de

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los grillos en toda la noche, con que se holgaban todos [There were dogs that never barked. . . . Trees and fruits of marvelous flavor. . . . Birds and the singing of crickets throughout the night, which everyone enjoyed]” (236/133). Sarduy’s own depiction of India in the rest of the “Diario Indio” section both rejects and extends Columbus’s ethnographic awe in the face of the other. Although Sarduy refuses any value judgments on what is described, he, like Columbus, makes India an indisputable sign of the fantastic by virtue of the very vastness of its description. In a stream-ofconsciousness narration of some thirty pages (written, Sarduy explains, in a Nepalese monastery while listening to the prayer chants of exiled Tibetan monks),49 the “Diario Indio” section of Cobra guides the reader through a sacred and profane geography of funeral pyres, Hindu temples, Islamic mosques, Buddhist stupas, brothels, monuments, urban ghettoes, and dusty fields in an attempt to write the unconscious of the very idea of “India.” No idyll, Sarduy’s description deserves quotation at some length: Juntando en círculo el pulgar y el índice—esferillas de oro pegadas a la nariz, lunares de celuloide en las mejillas, sobre los párpados brilladera roja—, en batallón, quince apsaras de voces roncas, frente a los fumaderos, saltan sobre los que duermen apilados en las aceras, ripiando a los pasantes por la camisa. Danzan, eso sí: en los cuerpos las tres flexiones. En saris de colores fluorescentes, presas en sus jaulas superpuestas, comiendo maní chillan las putas. Una cortina mugrienta deja ver la cama y las esteras desde donde, encaramada, la familia juzga el jadeo. . . . Arroz a los pies, embarrado de polvo rojo, en su templo de cemento, un dios-monito ameniza la aldea—los ojos bolas de vidrio, en el hocico pétalos pegados. Azoradas, como cigüeñas que oyen ruidos nocturnos, tres cabezas lo vigilan sobre un cuello: azul de metileno, azafrán, blanco de cáscara de huevo. Collar de flores, un toro mostaza pace. Traqueteo de la noria que gira. Cantan—en la polvareda los turbantes morados—a lo lejos el chillido de un mono. Huyen: cascabeles en los tobillos, pesados aretes, en las narices aros. Signos negros en la frente, los perros ladran de otro modo. (231–32) Joining thumb and forefinger in a circle—golden spheres stuck to their nose, celluloid beauty marks on their cheeks, red shadow on their eyelids— fifteen hoarse apsarases [sic] in battle formation, facing the smoking rooms, jump on those sleepers piled on the sidewalks, shredding the shirts of passersby. They’re dancing, that’s for sure: on the bodies, the three flexions. In fluorescent saris, trapped in their superimposed cages, eating peanuts, the whores shriek. A grimy curtain allows one to glimpse the bed and the mats from the top of which the family appraises the panting. . . . Rice on his feet, smeared in red dust, a little monkey-god, in his concrete temple, entertains the village—his eyes glass balls, petals stuck to his nose.

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Startled like storks hearing nocturnal sounds, three heads watch over him upon a neck: methylene blue, saffron, eggshell white. Necklace of flowers, a mustard bull grazes. A jolting from the turning water wheel. They’re singing—purple turbans in the cloud of dust—; far away, a monkey’s shriek. They flee: bells on ankles, heavy earrings, hoops on their nostrils. Black signs on their foreheads, the dogs bark differently. (130–31)

India here combines the baroque and anamorphosis, for it is at once a place of dizzying, saturated excess (sexual, visual, demographic, semiotic) and a moment of reading that demands of the reader shifts in space and time, first to Sarduy’s Cuba, for which India serves as surrogate, and second to the Cuba originally mistaken for India by Columbus. In a juxtaposition of images that seems designed to narrate Sarduy’s vision of Oriental space as the place where distinctions collapse, the divine apsaras (heavenly nymphs) mingle with the urban poor while human prostitutes and wild monkeys are both heard, objects of the same verb, to shriek (chillar). More chaotic than melodious, more gritty than natural, Sarduy’s India is one where even the dogs “bark differently,” their noise a deliberate contradiction of Columbus’s tranquil Indies where “había perros que jamás ladraron [there were dogs that never barked].” On the level of description Sarduy’s India presents the negative image of Columbus’s India. On the level of identification, however, both Indias converge, twin displacements of a Cuba lost (for Sarduy) and found (for Columbus). As a projection of loss Sarduy’s India embraces an over-the-top code of representation. The afore-quoted passage is explicitly cinematic in tone, flooded with color and sound from the carefully made-up apsaras, luridly painted and variously smeared gods, fluorescent saris, purple turbans, and black forehead markings to the catalogue of shrieking, panting, singing, tinkling, and barking. Metaphoric and metonymic chains of description attempt to substitute certain signs for “India” and then to displace those signs into a shifting, metamorphosing series whose only constant is the referent (“Indian-ness”) with which each signifier, from the mythological to the mundane, from the divine to the human, from the Technicolor to the animal, claims contact. Like a cultural lightning rod, the chain of signification channels the gaze on cultural otherness into a narrative form that is disturbingly stereotypic, consciously parodic, and pointedly devoid of interpretive commentary. If Sarduy’s lost Cuba functions as a version of Lacan’s objet a, that object from which the subject has been and in some sense always will be separated, Sarduy’s imagined India functions as the Lacanian Other, the (mis)recognition of which enables the self to know itself. Like the Lacanian

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Other, India offers no guarantees, either of the cohesion of the self who searches or of its own cohesion as the object of the search. In the last pages of the “Diario Indio” section of Cobra, the motorcyclists-turned-monks find a Grand Lama who sells religious trinkets on the India-Tibet border and provides his seekers with nothing but mundane answers, spiritual clichés, and plugs for his enlightenment-enhancing goods. In response to a seeker’s question, “¿Cuál es el verdadero camino de la Liberación? [What is the true road to Liberation?],” the text gives the following response: “el gran lama se queda en silencio. Una risita boba (en el salón contiguo, sobre un sofá, sus hijos hablan por un teléfono rojo, de material plástico) [the grand lama remains silent. A silly giggle (in the next room, on a sofa, his children talk over a red telephone, made of plastic)]” (259/147). In this scene of putative revelation, the red plastic telephone is out of place, glaringly artificial, the quintessential kitsch object. According to Matei Calinescu, the essence of the kitsch object lies in “a curious semiotic ambiguity” oscillating between the genuine and the fake.50 Kitsch constitutes a singularly appropriate aesthetic for a novel dedicated to the proposition that the “genuine” is always only a myth when it comes to identity. It is the opacity of kitsch, its simultaneous inaccessibility to and simulation of the discourse of “the real” that intrigues Sarduy. In a subsection of the “Diario Indio” section of Cobra entitled “Las Indias galantes” (The Gallant Indies), Sarduy employs the aesthetic of kitsch in order to portray an Indian stage production. An opening announcement by the theater doorman serves both to introduce the performance and to signal to the reader the presence of a distinctly kitsch blending of the fake and the genuine: “Esta noche . . . en escena, un dios real [Tonight . . . on stage, a real god].” Accompanied by the clash of cymbals and riding a flying ox, the sun god appears along with Titans and mechanical cows. In the ensuing battle a many-armed demon, “como un ventilador gigante [like a giant electric fan],” menacingly approaches the sun god only to be vanquished: “El Bellaco desorbita los ojos, saca una lengua felpuda y amarilla, patalea . . . y cae al suelo entre llamaradas sulfurosas, cuchillos rotos y orejas destornilladas que saltan hasta la sala donde se las arrebatan los fanáticos [The Villain pops out his eyes, sticks out a plushy yellow tongue, kicks madly . . . and falls to the ground amidst brimstone flames, broken knives and unscrewed ears which leap toward the audience where the fanatics grab for them]” (238–39/134–35). This special-effects India, pointedly constructed with mechanical cows and a fanlike demon, yet received as real by its “fanatic” audience, crystallizes the ambiguity of the kitsch object. In its kitsch incarnation here and in the Grand Lama’s red plastic telephone, India frustrates expectations that it will be the mystic site of the answer, the authentic, the eternal traditional that transcends the vicissitudes of history and makes of national identity an ever-repeating same. Cobra’s India is ul-

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timately nothing more than a kind of radical externalization of the lost object at the heart of Sarduy’s national mourning, a displacement of Cuba that encases nothing and refuses all possibilities of surrogate emotional incorporation. CULTUR AL REPRESENTATION AND THE AESTHETICS OF KITSCH

Sarduy explicitly defines the India depicted in Cobra as being “no la India erróneamente interpretada por la neurosis occidental, que intenta la imposible asimilación de una espiritualidad a otra, sino la India de pacotilla, ésa de los films hindúes donde todo el tiempo hay gente que canta en un jardín y las diosas de ciento brazos resuelven los problemas de los protagonistas [not the India erroneously interpreted by a Western neurosis that attempts the impossible absorption of one spirituality into another, but rather the kitsch India, the India of those Hindi films in which people are constantly singing in a garden and in which hundred-armed gods resolve the problems of the characters].”51 If the kitsch India that Sarduy images in the staged battle of the gods, in the Grand Lama’s red plastic telephone, or in the visual excesses of the Hindi film is intended to serve as a barrier to “neurotic” Western interpretation, it is worth remembering that in an Indian context the aesthetic of kitsch has served recently not to close off interpretation but to invite it. The art critics Patricia Uberoi and Tapati Guha Thakurta offer deeply historical accounts of the ways in which the avant-garde style of nineteenthcentury Indian “calendar art” attained in the twentieth century the paradoxical status of “authentic Indian ‘kitsch.’ ”52 Calendar art refers to a particular style of color reproductions created by the late-nineteenth-century artist Raja Ravi Varma and subsequently used to represent mythological, divine, and patriotic motifs on business calendars and religious objects, as well as in the packaging and advertising of various household commodities.53 Ravi Varma’s artistic style blended the techniques of European oil painting and the realist genres of life-size portraiture and landscape painting with Indian mythological content.54 The resultant portraits of Indian deities and panoramas of regional “types” of Indian womanhood were immensely popular among both British colonials and elite anglicized Indians. The artist responded to entreaties to distribute his art as a “national service” by sending many of his best-known works to England to be oleographed and subsequently made available to mass reproduction. In a later nationalist age Ravi Varma’s art was condemned by many Indian art critics as insufficiently Indian, its late-Victorian British techniques too distant from more indigenous or nationalist styles of representation, its hybrid genealogy better described as an essential inauthenticity. Indeed, the rise of an officially “national” art “rested centrally on the dismissal and displacement

Anonymous postcard in the calendar art style, portrait of the deities Lakshmi and Ganesha

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of Ravi Varma’s work as ‘kitsch.’ ”55 This is a familiar story in which an elite colonial technology is first appropriated by the colonized, then resignified and rejected by anticolonial nationalists, only to find a final ironic afterlife in the domain of popular culture at home and in the diasporic abroad, where calendar art still reigns supreme as an image of India. I tell this story in order to suggest that the “hundred-armed gods” that crystallize Sarduy’s India de pacotilla (kitsch India) can reveal a rich historical depth beneath their surface when they are read from within an Indian context. For Sarduy this depth is fundamentally inaccessible to Western knowledge. The pacotilla, or kitsch, aesthetic amounts in this regard to the obverse of depth, the refusal of history, the waylaying of interpretation. In a 1970 interview, Sarduy situates Cobra’s kitsch India against the hermeneutic fantasies and historical obsessions of the Western subject. [Cobra’s India] no se trata de una India transcendental, metafísica profunda, sino al contrario, una exaltación de la superficie y yo diría hasta de la pacotilla india. Yo creo . . . que la única descodificación que podemos hacer en tanto que occidentales, que la única lectura no neurótica de la India que nos es posible a partir de nuestro logocentrismo es esa que privilegia su superficie. El resto es traducción cristianizante, sincretismo, verdadera superficialidad.56 We’re not dealing (in Cobra) with a transcendental, metaphysical, profound India, but on the contrary, an exaltation of its surface and what I would call Indian kitsch. I believe . . . that the only decoding we can perform as Westerners, the only nonneurotic reading of India that is possible from our logocentric position, is that which India’s surface privileges. The rest is Christianizing translation, syncretism, true superficiality.

Sarduy’s embrace of the kitsch India suggests that representations of the other can escape replications of ethnocentric fantasy to the extent that they give up on the notion of an unmediated or “deep” knowledge of the other. In contrast with the ethic of transparency that Edward Said has so powerfully shown to govern Western gazes upon the Orient (“Orientals were rarely seen or looked at: they were seen through . . .”),57 Sarduy proposes the “exaltation” of surface and the embrace of semiotic excess as a mode of cultural contact. While a rendering of the Orient as a site of excess, fantastic wealth, pansexual promise, and nameless multitudes can and has been incorporated into a Western Orientalist mythology of a despotic and decadent Orient, excess can also be read as a strategic rejection of a particular mode of Orientalist vision. Excess can frustrate the transparency to which the visual pretends by refocusing the eye on the interplay of surface and texture, thereby detracting from the insistent wish to see “underneath” the image or “behind” that veil so synecdochal of the fantasized Orient. Sarduy’s formulation of pacotilla, or kitsch, theatricalizes the veil rather than lifts it, just as his theatricalization of the transvestite body privileges

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the incessant questions posed by a cross-coded body over the answers that would result from knowing if Cobra were “really” a woman or not. Kitsch is to be distinguished from the fetish, though both are mechanisms of preserving a veil over the object seen. Whereas the fetish disavows knowledge of sexual difference and would lay a screen over phallic lack, kitsch has nothing to hide. There is nothing compensatory about kitsch, which makes a point of its own inadequacy. In its refusal to read or know the other, Sarduy’s kitsch India attempts to frustrate monolithic concepts of difference and identity and to reject the binarizing logic of us/them in favor of the diffuse aesthetic of the surface. The subsequent spread of representations of cultural otherness far and wide across the social field does cause Western fantasy to lose its hold in the face of the sheer dissemination of the desired object (or other). However, the wildly proliferating, mutating surface of India in Cobra too often seems to congeal into a series of rigid, static images (garlanded bulls, celluloid deities, screaming monkeys, cryptic gurus) whose durability is precisely that of the cultural stereotype. Reading Sarduy’s kitsch aesthetic of cultural representation against, for example, contemporary Indian scholarship on calendar art kitsch, one wonders if la India de pacotilla (kitsch India) does not silence too much, quelling not only what postcolonial studies refer to as “subaltern voice” but equally the complex determinations of subaltern history.58 Doesn’t Sarduy’s insistence that we take kitsch only at its surface value and his subsequent use of kitsch as a mode of cultural knowledge effectively flatten cultural difference, reducing it to a series of iconic, almost fetishlike objects? Sarduy would, I think, have answered yes to this question and added that those icons and fetishes are all you can ever have, for to imagine that you can see deeper into cultural otherness is simply to live the Orientalists’ neurotic vision of knowledge as power. The alibi, such as it is, lies in the assertion that Cobra’s India is a strategic response to the force of Western fantasy, less a recuperation of that particular Orientalist imaginary than the conscious seizure of its most privileged tropes. But the tableaux of la India de pacotilla, with their scenes of the bazaar, the temple, and the stage and their fascination with the rituals of worship, worry the edges of that “nonneurotic cultural representation” that they claim to represent. It is in this simultaneous evacuation and occupation of an Orientalist terrain that Sarduy’s relationship to the problem of cultural difference and cultural representation most clearly appears. He cannot solve the problem but neither can he escape it. At once the grounds of identity and its vanishing point, conjured under the names of “the unconscious mind of Spanish” and “lo cubano” as well as of Cobra’s India, the problem of cultural difference in Sarduy’s work cannot finally be decoupled from the search for national identity in whose service it is mockingly enlisted.

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Sarduy’s effort to subject the novel of national identity to the displacing model of anamorphosis yields a novel that asserts its Cubanness tangentially and finds no approach to the expatriate’s remembered Cuba other than a deeply fascinated gaze onto the projected images of transvestite bodies and a kitsch India. Like the anamorphosis that forms a central figure in Sarduy’s system of cultural knowledge, the pacotilla or kitsch aesthetic is also a way of seeing. But pacotilla’s emphasis lies less on the (shifting) vantage point of vision than on the quality of the object seen. Fusing what Andrew Ross has called the object-category of kitsch and the subjective processes of camp, Cobra’s depiction of la India de pacotilla seeks, like camp, to undervalue the overvalued (the genuine) and to overvalue the undervalued (the fake).59 If Cobra’s focus on India as a ritual theater of the fake and on Cobra as a transvestite-turned-transsexual-turned-motorcycle gang memberturned-Tibetan monk, serve as the necessary Holbeinesque displacement by which Sarduy suggests the Cuban can “come at” (abordar) a Cuba that remains forever out of focus or lost, this anamorphic gaze nonetheless refuses the possibility of restoring the lack of the genuine through the visual compensations of the fake. Cuba in fact never does come into focus in Cobra, for the surrogate visual objects of la India de pacotilla and Cobra’s transvestite/transforming body so privilege the play of their surfaces that they cannot be seen through. There is no genuine Cuba “behind” an authentic India, no Cuba “alongside” or “beneath” Cobra’s ever-shifting, depthless body with its constant play of costume, makeup, and gesture. In Sarduy’s practice of cultural representation through kitsch, seeing the other is ultimately less a mode for the recovery of the self than simply a celebration of the self’s ineluctable loss. Sarduy’s entire aesthetics of loss can be seen as a riff on the Lacanian distinction between object and Other. According to Zizek, the Lacanian Other is to be distinguished from that object that the subject desires: “the object is separated from the Other itself . . . the Other itself ‘hasn’t got it,’ hasn’t got the final answer—that is to say, is in itself blocked, desiring . . . there is also a desire of the Other.”60 If Cuba is the lost object in Sarduy’s project, the central lack around which his work is structured, his objet a, then the transvestite body and India are the desiring Others, seemingly the means by which to access the lost object but ultimately only new places from which to apprehend loss. Anamorphosis does not deliver on its promise to approach Cuba and lo cubano by means of a displaced gaze on something else, nor is it meant to do so. The mutations of the transvestite body in Cobra and the semantic oscillation of la India de pacotilla between a lost authenticity and an abundant fakeness together embrace the visual not as a fetishistic compensation for loss but rather as a screen onto which to project, enlarge, and even flaunt loss. Cobra’s body and India’s imaginary stand as their own, willfully impenetrable answers to the questions that Sarduy

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claims guide his work: ¿Qué somos los cubanos? (What are we Cubans?) ¿Qué es la cubanidad? (What is Cubanness?) ¿Qué es lo cubano? (What is the Cuban?) ¿Qué es Cuba? (What is Cuba?)61 Loss in Sarduy’s work thus becomes its own plenitude in a move that undoes an entire tradition of foundationalist anticolonial and postcolonial critique that seeks to recover the indigenous, to give voice to the silenced, and to restore the dispossessed. Sarduy’s espousal of fake over authentic, plastic over organic, surface over depth, imitation over autochthonous disarticulates some of the governing paradigms of Latin American cultural theory. In their place Sarduy leaves little beyond the following gleeful pronouncement, to which Cobra serves as a kind of literary coda: “Todo es simulación, todo es apariencia, todo es fake [Everything is simulation, everything is appearance, everything is fake].”62 Certainly Sarduy’s task is not to produce accounts of the identitarian politics and liberatory struggles of nation, class, race, and gender in the anticolonial and postcolonial Third World of Central and Latin America. And it is probably a disservice to Sarduy’s work and its aesthetics of cultural representation to measure it exclusively against those struggles. But we equally miss the mark if we read Sarduy as having nothing to do with the postcolonial world and its concerns, many of which have found expression in the language of psychoanalysis. In its highlighting of the impossibility of an unmediated return to a cultural or national home and in its mocking encounters with the narratives of modern identity, Sarduy’s brand of psychoanalytic cultural criticism resists the call to deploy the tropes of exile and return, of loss and displacement, on the respective separate terrains of nationalism and psychoanalysis and opens us instead to the possibilities of their encounter. The resultant account of a national longing that moves with what Zizek calls desire’s “infinite metonymy” from one object to another reveals a surprising melancholy beneath the surface of Sarduy’s irreverent kitsch aesthetic.63 Poignant almost against its will, Sarduy’s Technicolor aesthetic of loss figures not simply the melancholy of the expatriate for whom there can be no return home but also the broader melancholy of the subject who lives its desire with the difficult knowledge that no object can ever answer its lack. NOTES

I thank Roberto González Echevarría for first introducing me to the work of Severo Sarduy and for the generous encouragement and expert advice he gave on an early form of this essay. I am also grateful to audiences at Yale University and the University of California at Santa Cruz for questions and comments that sharpened my thinking, to Lidia Santos and Ania Loomba for valuable reading recommendations, and to David Kazanjian and David Eng for astute editorial suggestions and great patience. All translations are my own except where otherwise noted.

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1. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in General Psychological Theory, trans. Joan Rivière, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Collier Books, 1963), 164–66. 2. On this history see Judith Weiss, Casa de las Américas: An Intellectual Review in the Cuban Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Estudios de Hispanófila, 1977). 3. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), 8. For additional examples of Tel quel’s embrace of Cobra see: Barthes, “Sarduy: La face baroque,” La quinzaine littéraire 28 (1967): 13; Philippe Sollers and Roland Barthes, “Severo Sarduy,” in Severo Sarduy, ed. Jorge Aguilar Mora (Madrid: Editorial Fundamentos, 1976), 107–22; Philippe Sollers, “La boca obra,” Tel quel (Paris) 4 (1970): 35; and Hélène Cixous, “O,C, O,B,R,A,B,A,R,O,C,O: A Text-Twister,” Review 74 (1974): 26–31. For an assessment of Cobra’s critical reception, see Suzanne Jill Levine, “Cobra: El discurso como bricolage,” in Severo Sarduy, ed. Mora, 123–35. 4. Roberto Fernández Retamar, Caliban: Apuntes sobre la cultura en Nuestra América (Mexico: Editorial Diogenes, S.A., 1971), 75. 5. See Roberto González Echevarría, La ruta de Severo Sarduy (Hanover: Ediciones del Norte, 1987), 169; Ana María Barrenchea, “Severo Sarduy o la aventura textual,” in Textos Hispanoamericanos de Sarmiento a Sarduy (Caracas: Monte Avile Editores, 1978), 221–34. 6. Severo Sarduy, “Entrevista con Severo Sarduy: Una nueva interpretación del barroco,” interview by Basilia Papastamatiu, Imagen (Caracas) 14–15 (1967): 14. 7. Fernández Retamar, Caliban, 11. 8. José Martí, “Nuestra América,” in Política de Nuestra América (México: Siglo Veintiuno, 1977), 37–43, quotations on 41, 39. 9. See Lidia Santos: “Kitsch y cultura de masas en la poética de la narrativa neobarroca latinoamericana,” in Barrocos y modernos: Nuevos caminos en la investigación del barroco iberoamericano, ed. Petra Schumm (Madrid: Iberoamericana, and Frankfurt: Vervuert, 1998), 337–51, 338; and “Le kitsch comme métalangage: Le récit dans l’Amérique latine des années soixante-dix et quatre-vingt,” in Séductions du kitsch: Roman, art et culture, ed. Eva Le Grand (Montréal: XYZ éditeur, 1996), 97– 112. 10. Although it would be more appropriate to the conventions of the transvestite community to refer to Cobra as “she,” I will use the construction “he/she.” Though unwieldy, it nonetheless captures and highlights the semantic ambiguity of the situation in a way that I think Sarduy himself might have appreciated. 11. Severo Sarduy, Cobra (Barcelona: Editorial EDHASA, 1972), 60; Severo Sarduy, Cobra and Maitreya, trans. Suzanne Jill Levine (Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1995), 31–32. Subsequent citations to Cobra appear parenthetically in the body of the text and present the Spanish page numbers first, the English second. Here I have amended Levine’s translation of “a mound of Indian junk,” preferring to render pacotilla as “kitsch.” 12. Emir Rodríguez Monegal, “Las metamorfosis del texto,” in Severo Sarduy, ed. Aguilar Mora, 35–62, 48. 13. Jorge Aguilar Mora, “Cobra, cobra la boca obra, recobra, barroco,” in Severo Sarduy, ed. Aguilar Mora, 25–35, 26. 14. Severo Sarduy, “Diálogo con Severo Sarduy: Las estructuras de la narración,” interview by Emir Rodríguez Monegal, Mundo Nuevo (Paris) 2 (1966): 15–26, 16.

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15. Sarduy, “Diálogo con Severo Sarduy,” 16. 16. Slavoj Zizek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991). 17. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 85–90, 88–92. 18. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 106. 19. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 92, 94. 20. Slavoj Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), 76, 81. 21. Zizek, Plague of Fantasies, 76. 22. Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” in Against Interpretation (New York: Dell, 1967), 280. 23. Severo Sarduy, “La serpiente en la sinagoga,” interview by Julia Kushigian, Vuelta (Mexico) 89 (April 1984): 14–20, 20. 24. “Lectura barroca: ni concha ni cráneo—meditación sin soporte—; sólo cuenta la energía de conversión y la astucia en el desciframiento del reverso—el otro de la representación—; la pulsión de simulacro que en Los Embajadores, emblemáticamente, se desenmascara y resuelve en la muerte. [Baroque reading: neither shell nor skull—meditation without grounds—; what counts is only the energy of conversion and cunning in the decipherment of the opposite—representation’s other—; the drive of the simulation that in The Ambassadors, emblematically, unmasks itself and dissolves into death].” Sarduy, La simulación (Caracas: Monte Avile Editores, 1982), 27. 25. Benedict Anderson suggests the force of the “must-have” account of nation and gender in his formulation of the following “paradox” of nationalism: “The formal universality of nationality as a socio-cultural concept—in the modern world everyone can, should, will ‘have’ a nationality, as he or she ‘has’ a gender—vs. the irremediable particularity of its concrete manifestations. . . .” Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991; originally published 1983), 5. 26. Roberto González Echevarría, La ruta de Severo Sarduy (Hanover: Ediciones del Norte, 1987), 9. On Lacan’s linguistic psychoanalysis, see Anthony Wilden’s translation, with editorial notes and commentary, of Lacan’s 1968 Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981); and John P. Muller and William J. Richardson, Lacan and Language: A Reader’s Guide to Écrits (New York: International Universities Press, 1982). 27. Jean Michel Fossey, “From Boom to Big Bang,” Review 74 (1974): 7–12, 10. 28. Severo Sarduy, “Interview/Severo Sarduy” interview by Roberto González Echevarría, trans. Jane E. French, Diacritics 2, no. 2 (summer 1972): 41–45, 43–44. For a broader account of Sarduy’s theorization of the baroque, which also encompasses the realms of economics (the baroque as supplementary excess), astronomy (the baroque as the ellipsis of planetary movement), textuality (the baroque as intertextual grafting, citation, plagiarism, parody, and the elimination of authorial originality), psychoanalysis (the baroque as the subject’s constant search for a series of part-objects or objets a such as the maternal breast, the gaze, the voice, excrement), politics (the baroque as the revolutionary, parodic subversion of bourgeois order), and nature (the baroque as an expression of the fecundity of the South American continent), see Sarduy’s book-length essay Barroco (Buenos Aires: Editorial Suda-

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mericana, 1974). Also see: Severo Sarduy, “Entrevista con Severo Sarduy: Una nueva interpretación del Barroco,” interview with Basilia Papastamatiu, Imagen 14–15 (1967): 1–3; Severo Sarduy, “Conversación con Severo Sarduy,” interview by Emir Rodríguez Monegal, Revista del Occidente 93 (1970): 315–43, 341–42; Roberto González Echevarría, “Rehearsal for Cobra,” Review 74 (1974): 38–43, 38; and Jean Michel Fossey, “Severo Sarduy: Máquina barroca revoluciónaria,” in Severo Sarduy, ed. Aguilar Mora, 15–24. 29. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari use the term “analytic imperialism” to describe how the historical institution of psychoanalysis has worked to recontain and recode the free flow of desire by means of the global narratives of Oedipus, the nuclear family, castration, and its “despotic signifier,” the phallus. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. and ed. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 51–138. 30. Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, “Seeking the Third Term: Desire, the Phallus, and the Materiality of Language,” in Feminism and Psychoanalysis, ed. Richard Feldstein and Judith Roof (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 40–64, 53. 31. Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992), 16. 32. Sarduy, La simulación, 15. 33. Severo Sarduy, “Los motivos de Cobra,” interview with Severo Sarduy by E. Bustamente, Zona Franca 16 (December 1974): 22–24, 22. 34. See Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6–18. 35. The insect imagery consciously cites the work of Roger Caillois, a member of the French Collège de Sociologie whose writing on animal mimicry also influenced Lacan in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, 99–100. Drawing on the work of several American and French naturalists, Caillois points out that the mimetic impulse often backfires, as in the case of the geometer-moth caterpillars, who simulate twigs so well that gardeners prune them, or the phyllia insects, whose simulation of leaves leads them to homophagy. The biologically inefficient drive toward protective mimicry expresses for Caillois a deeper drive toward the dizzying pleasures of a dangerous luxury, a kind of animal drag. Roger Caillois, Le mimétisme animal (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1963), especially 52–58, 101–2; and Roger Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” trans. John Shepley, October 31 (1984): 17–32. 36. Sarduy, “Interview/Severo Sarduy,” 44. On the connections between transvestism and writing, see Severo Sarduy, “Escritura/travestismo,” Mundo Nuevo 20 (1968): 72–74. 37. See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 24–25; Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories/Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1991), 13–31; and, for a reworking of the theory of gender performativity, Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993). In an argument similar to Butler’s claim that drag is “a kind of imitation for which there is no original” (“Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” 21–22), Sarduy describes the transvestite not as copying a gender but as simulating one. Whereas

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imitation traditionally defines itself as the necessarily fallen copy of a prior model, simulation attempts the deauthorizing “imposture” of the original in a space marked by “la inexistencia del ser mimado [the nonexistence of the being who is mimed]” (La simulación, 13). In other words, the simulation of femininity reveals that woman, in Lacan’s notorious formulation, does not exist. Butler expresses this point in her definition of gender as an “effect” that is “performatively produced and compelled by the regulatory practices of gender coherence . . . always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to preexist the deed” (Gender Trouble, 24–25). Sarduy’s own elaboration of performativity through the concept of simulation encompasses not only transvestism but also protective mimicry (animal drag) and the visual games of anamorphosis and trompe l’oeil. About all of these he writes: “No copian, no se definen y justifican a partir de las proporciones verdaderas sino que producen, utilizando la posición del observador, indulgéndolo en la impostura, la verosimultud del modelo, se incorporan, como en un acto de depredación, su aparencia, lo simulan [They do not define and justify themselves from the true dimensions of the original. Rather, they make use of their position as observers and indulge in imposture in order to produce the verisimilitude of the model; they scornfully incorporate its appearance, they simulate it]” (La simulación, 19). Transvestism and anamorphosis are animated by a similar impulse toward simulation, and both perform a similar kind of work, namely, the wholesale disintegration of the gendered or viewing subject as in any sense preexistent, stable, or continuous. It is my contention that Cobra’s transvestite imagery and anamorphic strategy together effect a related fragmentation of the specifically national subject and the nation itself. 38. Sarduy, Barroco, 100. 39. Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 18. 40. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 33. 41. Garber, Vested Interests, 336. 42. Sarduy, La simulación, 65. 43. Sarduy, “La serpiente en la sinagoga,” 15. 44. Sarduy, La simulación, 26. I quote this passage in full in n. 24. 45. On Sarduy and textual parody, see Sarduy, “La serpiente en la sinagoga,” 14; and Julia Kushigian, Orientalism in the Hispanic Literary Tradition: In Dialogue with Borges, Paz, and Sarduy (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991), 87– 95. 46. González Echevarría, La ruta de Severo Sarduy, 171. 47. See n. 37. 48. See González Echevarría, La ruta de Severo Sarduy. Of particular note for my argument is González Echevarría’s characterization of Sarduy’s own visits to India as “regresos mediatizados a Cuba” (53). 49. Severo Sarduy, “Los motivos de Cobra,” 23. 50. Matei Calinescu, The Five Faces of Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987), 251. 51. Severo Sarduy, “Severo Sarduy: Cuerpos y libros,” interview by Ernesto Shoo, Primera plana (Buenos Aires) 336 (June 3, 1969): 58–59, 59. 52. Patricia Uberoi, “Feminine Identity and National Ethos in Indian Calendar

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Art,” Economic and Political Weekly (India), April 28, 1990, 41–48, 43; Tapati Guha Thakurta, “Women as ‘Calendar Art’ Icons: Emergence of Pictorial Stereotype in Colonial India,” Economic and Political Weekly (India), October 26, 1991, 91–99. 53. Thakurta, “Women as ‘Calendar Art’ Icons,” 95. See also Uberoi, “Feminine Identity and National Ethos,” 43. 54. On Ravi Varma’s “hybrid” style and appropriation of “the privileged genre of oil painting,” see Tapati Guha Thakurta, “Westernisation and Tradition in South Indian Painting in the Nineteenth Century: The Case of Raja Ravi Varma, 1848– 1906,” Studies in History 2, no. 2 (1986): 165–98, as quoted in Uberoi, “Feminine Identity and National Ethos.” Also see Thakurta, “Women as ‘Calendar Art’ Icons.” 55. Thakurta, “Women as ‘Calendar Art’ Icons,” 95; also see Uberoi, “Feminine Identity and National Ethos,” 43. 56. Sarduy, “Conversación con Severo Sarduy,” 318. At the time of this interview, Cobra was a work in progress and a number of excerpts had been published in Latin American and French journals. For a parallel discussion of India as kitsch, see Sarduy, “Severo Sarduy: Cuerpos y libros,” 59. 57. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1982; originally published 1978), 207. 58. On the complexities of subaltern voice, see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313. Lidia Santos’s work provides an important counterpart to my argument here by placing postmodern Latin American writers’ love affair with the kitsch aesthetic in a larger historical context. See note 9, above. 59. Andrew Ross, “Uses of Camp,” Yale Journal of Criticism 2, no. 1 (fall 1988): 1–24. 60. Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 122. 61. See Sarduy, “Diálogo con Severo Sarduy.” 62. Sarduy, “La serpiente en la sinagoga,” 14. 63. Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies, 81.

David Johnson

Theorizing the Loss of Land Griqua Land Claims in Southern Africa, 1874–1998

This essay considers how Western philosophical reflections on the loss of land connect with political attempts in contemporary South Africa to legislate and manage such loss suffered under apartheid. To be specific: (1) Do the writings of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud resonate in or articulate with the submissions before the Land Commission of South Africa addressing the loss of land suffered by black South Africans? (2) Do the histories of the loss of African land and the hearings before the South African Land Commission to recover land destabilize or suggest limits to Western discourses theorizing the loss of land? After setting out briefly theoretical reflections of Marx and Freud of relevance to the loss of land, I examine one submission before the Land Commission, namely, the application for compensation by the Griqua People’s Organization for the loss of the diamond-rich farm Vooruitzicht. In looking at this submission, I first set out the details of Griqua land claims in 1874, when Griqua land was lost, and then examine at some length the complexities of Griqua claims for restitution in 1998. I argue that the Griqua struggle for land restitution discloses a hierarchy of loss in which mourning the loss of loved ones (managed in South Africa by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission) takes precedence over the loss of land (managed by the Land Commission). This hierarchy is confirmed in Western discourses of mourning loss, which register the loss of land only faintly. Having wrestled with the meanings of land, loss, and mourning, I reflect finally on what it means to “theorize” the loss of land. 278

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OF LAND

Marx, throughout his writings, gave substantial attention to how the meaning of land and property might be theorized.1 Rather than attempting a full survey of his ideas, however, I confine myself here to what he wrote in the 1870s and 1880s, at the same time that Griqua land in southern Africa was being transferred into European hands. Although Marx’s knowledge of imperialist expansion in Africa was limited to general pronouncements— most famously expressed in Capital as “the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins”2—he discusses in the 1870s and 1880s three cases of contested landownership that suggest analogies to the contemporaneous process of African dispossession. In the first case, he revises his earlier views on Ireland, and argues in a letter on December 10, 1869, to Engels that “the English working class will never achieve anything before it has got rid of Ireland. The lever must be applied to Ireland.”3 The reason for reversing his belief that Ireland would necessarily follow the lead of the English working class lies in his reassessment of the particular form of Irish landownership. He explains his reasoning in a letter on April 9, 1870, to the German Americans S. Meyer and A. Voght as follows: “In Ireland the land question has hitherto been the exclusive form of the social question, because it is a question of existence, of life and death, for the immense majority of Irish people, and because it is at the same time inseparable from the national question.”4 What Marx acknowledges in this letter is that the agents of revolutionary change in nineteenth-century Europe will not in every instance be the urban proletariat. In the case of Ireland in particular, the resilience of precapitalist forms of landownership suggests that rural struggles against feudal forms of landownership will play a decisive role. In the second case, Marx reflects in “The Civil War in France” (1871) on the lessons of the Paris Commune and embraces the Commune’s commitment to the abolition of private property. Responding to what he describes as “the apologetic phraseology of the mouthpieces of present society,” Marx declares, “Yes, gentlemen, the Commune intended to abolish that class property which makes the labour of the many the wealth of the few. It aimed at the expropriation of the expropriators.”5 The theoretical assumption underlying this political exhortation is conveyed in more careful terms in his “First Draft of ‘The Civil War in France’ ” (1871), where Marx emphasizes the contingent nature of definitions of property. In The German Ideology (1846) Marx and Engels had attacked Feuerbach for elevating “a particular ‘real historical man,’ namely ‘the German,’ to the universal category of ‘Man,’ ” and in the Grundrisse (1858) Marx had attacked Ricardo and Smith for universalizing in like fashion the eighteenth-century Englishman “as an ideal, whose existence they projected into the past.”6 In

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the “Draft,” he extends his critique of ahistorical universalizing to those enemies of the Commune proclaiming the rights of private property: They talk in deprecatory tones of the threatened abolition of “property,” because in their eyes their present class form of property—a transitory historical form—is property itself, and the abolition of that form would therefore be the abolition of property. . . . As they now defend the “eternity” of capitalist rule and the wages system, if they had lived in feudal times or in the times of the slave system they would have defended the feudal system and the slave system, as founded on the nature of things. . . . They do not know that every social form of property has “morals” of its own.7

Though he mentions the morals rather than the laws of every social form of property in this passage, it is perhaps worth adding that Marx in this period remains much exercised by how the legal system secures a form of landownership appropriate to the mode of production.8 In the “Critique of the Gotha Programme” (1875), for example, he asks, “Are economic relations regulated by legal concepts of right or is the opposite not the case, that legal relations spring from economic ones?”9 In the third case, Marx seeks to distinguish the impact of capitalism on western European and on Russian forms of landownership. Marx’s fascination with Russia in the 1870s and 1880s is well documented, but, although he learned Russian, collected literally tons of Russian agricultural statistics, and left thirty thousand pages of rough notes on Russian affairs, he published very little on the country itself. His most direct reflections are contained in a short letter of March 8, 1881, to the Russian socialist Vera Zasulich, who had asked him for guidance regarding political strategy. The crux of Zasulich’s inquiry rested upon the fate of the rural commune: should Russian socialists defend the rural commune and devote their “strength to the liberation and development of the commune”? Or should they accept that the commune is destined to perish in the inexorable progress to capitalism and accordingly direct their energies “to conduct propaganda solely among the urban workers”?10 The theoretical axis of these questions is whether the rise of capitalism in western Europe as described in Capital, volume 1, provides a template for all societies subsequently encountering capitalist expansion. A central part of the question is whether precapitalist communal forms of land tenure must inevitably yield to private property. After four hesitant, repetitious, and conflicted drafts, Marx responded as follows: “The ‘historical inevitability’ of this course is therefore expressly restricted to the countries of Western Europe. . . . The analysis in Capital therefore provides no reasons for or against the vitality of the Russian commune. But the special study I have made of it . . . has convinced me that the commune is the fulcrum of social regeneration in Russia.”11 In Marx’s earlier drafts of the letter, his sympathy for Russian communal forms of

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land tenure is expressed more emphatically. In the first draft, for example, he suggests that the commune has the potential “to incorporate the positive achievements of the capitalist system, without having to pass under its harsh tribute.”12 Further, in the third draft, he argues that Russia should resist development through “English-style capitalist farming. . . . the English themselves made similar attempts in the East Indies; they only managed to spoil indigenous agriculture and to swell the number and intensity of famines.”13 What all of Marx’s writings in the 1870s and 1880s on landownership ultimately suggest is that notions of land are historically contingent. He observes the feudal vestiges of aristocratic landownership in Ireland, the brief triumph over private property in the Paris Commune, and the collective forms of land tenure in the precapitalist Russian rural communes, and in the tentative prose of the draft letters to Zasulich he concludes cautiously that forms of landownership compete and combine in different ways in different contexts. Whether his attempts here to theorize the meaning of land can extend to Griqua land claims in both 1874 and 1998 is the question I return to presently. OF LOSS

Marx sees the global spread of capitalism and private property from a European perspective and focuses accordingly on changing European modes of production and the European acquisition of land. Given his context, this is unsurprising, but his writings as a result offer only indirect insight into perspectives from beyond Europe on the destruction of precapitalist economies and on the loss of land to colonial agents. To try to find a vocabulary to convey this sense of destruction and loss, I turn now to a quite different European theorist, Sigmund Freud. Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” (1915) supplies a starting point in searching for a theoretical vocabulary for the experience of loss. Conceding that his conclusions regarding mourning and melancholia triggered by the experience of loss are based on but a few cases and that, accordingly, “we shall at the outset drop all claim to general validity,”14 Freud provides the following definitions: “Mourning is the reaction to the loss of a loved one or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on.”15 Melancholia, he continues, displays the same influences and symptoms as mourning, but it displays an important additional symptom, namely, “an extraordinary diminution in self-regard, an impoverishment of his ego on a grand scale.”16 In “The Ego and the Id” (1923), Freud develops his thoughts on melancholia further. Defining melancholia as a “painful disorder [where] an object which was lost has been set up inside the ego—that is, an object-cathexis

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has been replaced by an identification,” Freud concedes that he had failed initially to “appreciate the full significance of this process and did not know how common and typical it is.”17 For Freud, the “effects of the first identifications made in earliest childhood will be general and lasting,”18 and melancholia will arise principally in relation to the loss of these primary love-objects. However, he notes that the process of object-identification continues throughout the subject’s life and that the possibility of melancholia triggered by the loss of subsequent love-objects therefore persists. Furthermore, he acknowledges that “different identifications seize hold of consciousness in turn [and] there remains the question of conflicts between the various identifications in which the ego comes apart.”19 To what extent can Freud’s reflections here be extended to different historical contexts and to different experiences of loss?20 First, with regard to Freud’s suggestion that mourning is the reaction to “the loss of a loved one, or . . . some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on,” how far might the “and so on” of his definition be extended? The “and so on” of his definition suggests that the list of possible substitutes for the loss of a loved one is open-ended. Could Freud’s tentative “economics of pain”21 in “Mourning and Melancholia” be extended to involve mourning material loss, including the loss of land, and particularly in cases where land is a constituent element in the definition of one’s country? Freud insists that the complex work of mourning is “not at all easy to explain in terms of economics,”22 but my question introduces the economic not as a systemic metaphor for psychoanalytic healing but as a substitute for the love object.23 Second, with regard to Freud’s expanded definition of melancholia, can the object lost and then set up inside the ego—as an object-cathexis is replaced by identification—be the subject’s land? Of the different identifications that seize hold of consciousness in the course of the subject’s life, how is one to theorize an identification with land in relation to identifications with a mother, father, or libidinal object? Can Freud’s sense of the “conflicts between the various identifications” suggest a route to articulating the conflicts arising as a result of the loss of various objects of identification? Finally, can Freud’s reflections on the individual subject’s experience of loss be extended to a nation or community’s experience of loss? While it is tempting to treat the collective experience of loss as a general version of the particular individual subject’s experience of loss, the complex constitution and internal divisions within the collective suggest caution in making such a leap. Both Marx, in his recognition that his analysis of capitalism in Capital “is expressly restricted to the countries of Western Europe,” and Freud, in his willingness to “drop all claim to general validity for our conclusions,” invite modification of their own theorizing in the light of subsequent information. Accordingly, I hope to modify Marx’s own preliminary theories of

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competing forms of landownership, as well as Freud’s efforts at describing loss and its psychoanalytic consequences in the light of southern African land claims. To assess how these ideas and arguments articulate beyond their own European contexts, I turn first to the South African diamond fields of the 1870s and to the details of how the Griqua lost their land.

GRIQUA LAND CLAIMS, 1874

British Colonial Office papers documenting the legal struggles over ownership of the Kimberley diamond fields located on the farm Vooruitzicht in the 1870s have recently become available after a ninety-year secrecy restriction.24 Included in these papers are the many competing claims to Vooruitzicht, and I will now summarize just four of them. In Alfred Ebden’s petition of April 10, 1874, to Queen Victoria complaining of the Proclamation, he alleges that neither in the original grant of Vooruitzicht nor in the subsequent transfer thereof is there any reservation for the mining of precious stones in favor of the British government. He argues that the compensation he has received is woefully inadequate, and the procedures followed to effect it unjust: The public, if the measure your Petitioner now opposes is passed, will learn with consternation, that in a dependency of the British Crown proprietary and private rights are no more respected than they are in despotic Governments and barbarian communities. The Ordinance is, it is true, aimed apparently only at the proprietors of three or four farms; but the principle involved, and the precedent established, if it passes, will be to upset faith in the security of all titles, all proprietary rights throughout Griqualand West. . . . The measure, if carried, will strike home to every proprietor of property in Griqualand West, and though it may answer a temporary exigency, must create a profound distrust in the government.25

Ebden’s appeal was accompanied by petitions of other part owners, including one from the future prime minister of the Cape Colony, John X. Merriman. The result of Ebden’s appeal was that he was paid one hundred thousand pounds compensation by the Griqualand West government a year later. Ebden’s exasperated tone is justified: the laws protecting private property, normally nicely attuned to serve capitalist expansion, have been flouted here because the claims of the British Crown to the diamond fields have superseded the interests of individual capitalists. A second view of the ownership of Vooruitzicht is the one sponsored by the governor of the Cape Colony, Sir Henry Barkly, and fleshed out by the acting attorney-general of Griqualand West, Sidney Godolphin Alexander Shippard, with further support from Sir Patrick Colqhoun of the Inner Temple. Shippard identifies the title deed of Vooruitzicht as being held on

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perpetual quit-rent tenure, which he likens to the Roman Dutch form of tenure emphyteusis. He defines emphyteusis as “a lease or a grant to a man or his heirs general, with reversion to the lessor in case these heirs should fail, or the rent (canon or pensio) reserved should not be paid.”26 Going through numerous Roman and Roman Dutch authorities, Shippard compares the shift from feudal to private forms of ownership in seventeenth-century Europe to the nineteenth-century European occupation of colonial territories. Where Marx had criticized this process as the spurious transformation of existing unequal property relations to the status of “the general will” or “natural law,” Shippard of course deploys the old authorities to protect the interests of his client.27 In the case of Vooruitzicht, he concludes: For it may be laid down as an axiom based on the principles of the Civil and Roman-Dutch Law, on the essential nature of emphyteusis, and on the dicta of the greatest masters of the Dutch jurisprudence, that a tenant at perpetual quit-rent has no right whatever to mines, minerals, precious stones, or gems, found in his quit-rent land; and that they belong to the dominus directus, the lord of the soil, in this present instance, to the Crown.28

Colqhoun’s opinion reveals much less meticulous research than that of Shippard, for he relies on his personal prestige rather than his learning to lend weight to the case of the Crown. He concedes that the original title to the land held by the president of the Orange Free State was “a derivative title from one [Griqua chief] Kok,”29 but as for Shippard, so too for Colqhoun, this in no way affects the Crown’s ownership of Vooruitzicht or allows any basis for compensatory claims against the Crown. Colqhoun concludes: That the title of the present leasehold tenants of the Vooruitzicht farm is valid: That this title confers only emphyteutical rights to the surface: That these leasehold tenants have no right in the fee of the soil: That, save special grants from the Crown, all mines and precious stones found on the Vooruitzicht farm belong to the Crown: That none such belong to the leasehold tenants of the Vooruitzicht farm: . . . That the Government has the right and power to deal with the property called the Vooruitzicht farm.30

A variant on the Shippard/Colqhoun position on the ownership of Vooruitzicht is provided by Sir James Alexander of the Aborigine Protection Society, who defends Griqua land claims vis-à-vis the Boer republics (but not against the Crown). Alexander’s ideas are contained in a letter forwarded to the colonial secretary Lord Carnarvon on June 16, 1874, where he points out that the two Boer republics covet all native land:

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The two Republics are very grasping, and are exerting their utmost endeavours to possess themselves of all the lands of the native tribes. Some time ago they pretty well did this on paper by issuing Proclamations declaring the boundaries of their republics to be such as to embrace nearly all the independent native tribes, and as, according to the laws of these Republics, no coloured man can be a burgher, and none but burghers can possess landed property, it followed that the tribes were deprived not only of their lands but also their freedom.31

The limits of Alexander’s benevolent sentiments with regard to the Griqua are evident a paragraph later. First, he explains how eager Griqua chief Nicholas Waterboer was for his people’s land to be annexed by the British to prevent its falling into Boer hands, and second, he suggests urgent British expansion into the Transkei: “If England had not become a nation of Jews we should expect to see her striking out boldly in that direction in the interests of civilization and Christianity.”32 The third claim for Vooruitzicht is the one put forward by Waterboer. Where the arguments of Ebden, Shippard, Colqhoun, and Alexander are set out in full, Waterboer’s voice is only available in ventriloquized form in the minutes of a meeting between him and Richard Southey, the lieutenant-governor of Griqualand West, on May 19, 1874. In Southey’s summary of Waterboer’s views, he reproduces like Shippard a telos in Griqua patterns of landownership, from communal ownership to private property. According to Southey’s minutes, Waterboer claimed that there had been a form of private ownership among the Griqua since 1822, but he concedes that even in the present “there are other members of the Griqua community who occupied kraals or stations with common rights, such as were generally observed by the aboriginal inhabitants of Africa.”33 What comes through clearly is that in Griqua law it was illegal for any Griqua to sell Griqua land to a foreigner, whether the land was in common ownership or privately owned: [Southey asks:] Had any of these persons, private owners of land or common occupiers, the right, under Griqua law, to alienate such land by sale or otherwise, either by Griqua subjects or to strangers? [Waterboer replies:] Private owners could buy and sell among themselves, i.e. one Griqua subject to another, but the consent of the Chief in Council was necessary to render the transaction lawful. No foreigner could obtain lawful right to the land.34

The implication—one Southey does not pursue in his questions—is that occupancy of Griqua land by “foreigners” (including the Boer republics, smaller white businessmen such as Ebden, the De Beers Mining Company, and the British government) would always in terms of Griqua law be on the basis of rental, not transfer of ownership. Accordingly, for Waterboer,

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Vooruitzicht never left Griqua ownership, though it was rented under duress to a succession of colonial occupiers. What is also interesting about Southey’s leading questions and Waterboer’s responses is that they accept the same telos in forms of landownership as the early Marx. However, at around the same time that Marx was rethinking the assumption that private property necessarily succeeds communal ownership in the light of his Russian studies, Waterboer, under immense pressure from the full range of colonial forces, was endorsing the “civilizing evolution” from common property rights to private property. What is perhaps striking is the absence in Waterboer’s assertions here of declarations of any bond with the land besides an economic one. Freudian notions of the land as an object of identification for the Griqua must remain speculative, though the inhibiting influence of the interviewing context on Waterboer’s statements means such identification should not be discounted. For the Griqua to declare a strong psychological identification with their diamond-rich land would be unlikely to give them any strategic advantage in dealing with colonial officialdom. The final claim for the ownership of Vooruitzicht and its riches is the one made by white mine workers. In November 1874, 2,265 diggers led by Henry Tucker and Alfred Aylward signed a petition to Queen Victoria, complaining about Southey’s liberal style of governance and listing grievances, including high taxation, unchecked illegal diamond dealing, state incursions on free trade and property rights, and favoritism toward the Griqua. The petition includes the claim that ownership can derive from labor, with section 13 complaining of “insecurity of tenure being severely felt by many who have spent years of labour in improving property now threatened with confiscation,” and section 15 alleging that the diggers’ “hard-earned property consequently finds its way through dishonest servants into the hands of a class of illicit diamond buyers.”35 The public meeting building up to the petition was recorded in detail in the Diamond Fields Advertiser, and the relation between the Griqua and the white diggers—the two parties to have suffered loss—is set out in brutal terms by one of the digger spokesmen, G. R. Blanch: I will prove that, not only by one but by all three titles this country belonged properly to the Free State. 1st. By cession. The British Government through its Agent, Sir George Clark, ceded the Orange River Sovereignty to the Boers; this country was part of it; British titles being issued by Major Warden for some of the farms. 2ndly. By occupation. The Dutch farmers have lived here for years, as their very names prove; such as “De Beer,” “Du Toit’s Pan,” and have paid taxes to the Free State.

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3rdly. By conquest. There was actually nobody here to be conquered, but in 1857 a marauding Griqua Chief, named Scheel Jacobus, who made several raids into the Transvaal and Orange Free State, was attacked by their forces and killed, his tribe broken up, and 3000 head of cattle taken. The bones of some of his people may still be seen at “Bushman’s Kop.” If this country belonged to Mr. Waterboer, or Captain Waterboer, or His Majesty King Waterboer, of whom I wish to speak with the greatest respect, as he is the intimate friend of Her Majesty’s Representative here (laughter and cheers), why did not he either punish Scheel Jacobus himself, or resent the intrusion of Free State and Transvaal commandoes into his territories (hear, hear). Thus by all three titles the country belonged to the Free State, and I consider it disgraceful for a powerful Government to take away territory from a weak one, as for a highway robber to take away from a weaker man his purse.36

The diggers’ protests culminated in what came to be known as the Black Flag Rebellion. This was successfully contained by colonial troops, and the leadership—described by Sir Henry Barkly as a “small band of Fenians and German Red Republicans”37—was either imprisoned or driven from the diamond fields. There is much in these passages recording the loss of Griqua land that echoes Marx’s descriptions of transformations in forms of landownership in Europe: the legal system serves the interests of those expropriating land; communal forms of landownership are destroyed with capitalist expansion; and white digger sentiments regarding the Griqua confirm Marx’s description of Africa as “a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins.” However, in his insistence upon close attention to historical context, Marx opens the door to modifying the history of landownership he himself has mapped. And indeed, this fragment of colonial history confounds Marx’s European notions of changing modes of land tenure. In the first place, Marx’s writings on rent and landlords all derive from a feudal model and fail to articulate with the Griqua experience, where being the occupant of land counts for little in the face of colonial encroachment.38 Second, and more fundamentally, the question of race complicates any understanding of how the transition to capitalism occurs in southern Africa, expressed most vividly in the conflict between the white diggers and the Griqua. The position of black landowners like the Griqua in relation to white mine workers is quite different from that of landowners in Europe facing proletarian demands. Marx’s attempts to describe the tension between the urban and rural poor of Europe during this transition provide only rudimentary suggestions as to how these conflicts in the diamond fields might be expressed. The difficulties of extending Freud’s categories to these passages are of a different order. Waterboer in the colonial records never expresses an

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emotional attachment to the land. This might in part be due to the fact that the Griqua had acquired the land from the South Tswana only within the last century and therefore were themselves only relatively recent occupants. However, a more compelling reason for his silence is that the discourse of colonial governance as contained in the Colonial Office Papers excludes the vocabulary of emotion. Given then that discourses of law and public administration mediate all land claims and that discourses of affect are barred from colonial records, the nature of the Griqua attachment to land is impossible to read. Land is figured exclusively as an economic unit, and no evidence of an identification with the land beyond the material is available.

GRIQUA LAND CLAIMS, 1998

The restitution of land in postapartheid South Africa is regulated by four pieces of legislation. Section 8 (the Equality Clause) and Sections 121–123 of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa Act, No. 200 of 1993 (the Interim Constitution Act) provided for the setting up of the Land Commission. Section 121 lays down that “an Act of Parliament shall provide for matters relating to the restitution of land rights” for cases where dispossession of land “was effected under or for the purpose of furthering the object of a law which would have been inconsistent with the prohibition of racial discrimination contained in section 8 (2).” Section 122 establishes the Commission on Restitution of Land Rights, competent to: (a) investigate the merits of any claims; (b) mediate and settle disputes arising from such claims; (c) draw up reports on unsettled claims for submission as evidence to a court of law and to present any other evidence to the court; and (d) exercise and perform any such other powers and functions as may be provided for in the said Act.

Section 123 creates the Land Court, to which the Land Commission might submit claims for arbitration. The court is empowered to allocate alternative state-owned land to the claimant, to pay the claimant compensation, or to grant alternative relief. Second, the Restitution of Land Rights Act, No. 22 of 1994 puts in place the procedures for land restitution as prescribed in the interim constitution. The preamble captures the values underlying the act: To provide for the restitution of rights in land in respect of which persons or communities were dispossessed under or for the purpose of furthering the objects of any racially based discriminatory law; to establish a Commission on

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Restitution of Land Rights and a Land Claims Court; and to provide for matters connected therewith.

This act and the subsequent Land Restitution and Reform Laws Amendment Act, 1997, the third piece of legislation, set out the details for making a submission to the Land Commission. These details include: who can make claims (direct descendants of dispossessed persons, who had lost specific pieces of land after June 19, 1913, as a direct result of racist legislation); when claims can be made (the deadline for submitting claims is December 31, 1998, and the Land Court will sit for five years); procedures for making a claim (designed to make access to the Land Court as free as possible); and the scope and functions of the Land Commission and Land Court. Fourth, the institutions and procedures relating to land restitution were cemented in the final constitution, the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa Act, No. 108 of 1996. Section 25 sets out the right to property as follows: (1) No one may be deprived of property except in terms of law of general application, and no law may permit arbitrary deprivation of property. (2) Property may be expropriated only in terms of law of general application— (a) for public purposes or in the public interest; and (b) subject to compensation, the amount, timing, and manner of payment, of which must be agreed, or decided or approved by a court.

To summarize the remaining sections: Section 3 lays down that compensation must be “just and equitable”; section 4 defines the “public interest” as including the “nation’s commitment to land reform”; and section 5 orders the state to take legislative and other measures “within its available resources” to promote land reform. Sections 6 and 7 relate directly to the Land Commission and stand as follows: (6) A person or community whose tenure of land is legally insecure as a result of past racially discriminatory laws or practices is entitled, to the extent provided by an Act of Parliament, either to tenure which is legally secure, or to comparable redress. (7) A person or community dispossessed of property after 19 June 1913 as a result of past racially discriminatory laws or practices is entitled, to the extent provided by an Act of Parliament, either to restitution of that property, or to equitable redress.

With the formidable sanction of the Constitution, a legal means of addressing the claims of the dispossessed was thus put in place.39 At first glance, South Africa’s land reform legislation would appear to

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disqualify Marx’s notion of property law as axiomatically in the service of the landowning classes, providing as it does for land to be returned to black South Africans dispossessed under racist land laws. What the legislation does not do, however, is disrupt the primacy of private property: Section 25 of the final constitution secures the rights of private ownership, and where land is to be returned to black owners, it is returned as private property. Whereas in the 1870s Marx imagined the viability of modes of land tenure other than private property, and indeed black South Africans still owned land in communal relations, in the 1990s private property is hegemonic. The result is a legal dispensation that ultimately protects private property and capitalist economic production, but—and this is a crucial qualification—at the same time provides the means for limited restitution. Gillian Rose’s insistence that human law cannot be reduced to “sheer violence,” but that there is a “positive or symbolic law to be acknowledged”40 comes closest to capturing this contradiction. Launched with much ceremony and optimism in May 1995, the Land Commission received far more claims than expected. By the end of 1997, it had already received 23,009 claims, 19,551 in urban areas and 3,458 in rural areas; by the end of 1998, the total had risen to 36,485 claims. The commission has been severely criticized for its slow delivery, particularly by nongovernmental land rights organizations, which charge that it proceeds by cumbersome, bureaucratic, and legalistic procedures. Statistics released by the Department of Agricultural and Land confirm this impression, though the first Land Commission chief, Joe Seremane, was swift to defend the commission’s record: “We are the Cinderella of commissions. . . . If the government will deny me the R20-million [$3 million] I need to do my job for the citizens of this country, then they are not taking [land] restitution seriously.”41 By the end of 1998, only 19 land claims had been settled, though by June 1999 this figure had increased dramatically to 262 settled claims, an improvement widely attributed to the shift from a judicial to an administrative review procedure. Notwithstanding this improvement, the desire for accelerated land reform is undiminished: a survey commissioned by the Directorate of Monitoring and Evaluation in 1997 disclosed that 67.7 percent of households, or 25.6 million people, needed land and that at the time of publication only 0.2 percent of households had received land. Seremane’s defense of the Land Commission’s record might be expanded: it has not received the publicity, resources, and support of the other constitutionally created commissions (the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the Human Rights Commission); in its embrace of freemarket ideologies, the African National Congress government has substantially reduced state spending on welfare, and this extends to the Land Commission; and crucially, if all land claims were to be taken seriously and

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pursued in full, such a process would mean a fundamental redistribution of wealth, something majority rule itself has not delivered. It is with these wider considerations in mind that I now turn to the claim of the Griqua People’s Organization before the Land Commission. The claim by the Griqua People’s Organization against the De Beers Mining Company for compensation for the loss of the farm Vooruitzicht vividly dramatizes the limits of the land restitution process. Headed by the Reverend Daniel James Kanyiles, the Griqua People’s Organization claims to be directly descended from the nineteenth-century Griqua chief Nicholas Waterboer, who governed the independent kingdom of Griqualand West until it was annexed in 1871 by the British after the discovery of diamonds.42 Based in the Northern Cape, the Griqua People’s Organization has eight branches and approximately six thousand members, most of whom live in extreme poverty. Its constitution has as its aim the promotion of the interests of the Griqua people in the Northern Cape, and it is in this spirit that the claim against De Beers is being pursued.43 The De Beers Mining Company also has nineteenth-century origins in the Northern Cape, with Cecil John Rhodes building the company on Kimberley diamonds and laying the foundation for De Beers to control the world diamond market in the twentieth century.44 Handwritten in Afrikaans, the Griqua People’s Organization’s submission to the Land Commission consists of a cover letter to the land claims commissioner for the Western Cape, Advocate Wallace Mgoqi, and a copy of a letter sent to the De Beers lawyer Webber Wentzel. After listing the nature of the claims against De Beers, the cover letter to the land commissioner informs him that “our total claim against the De Beers Diamond Company runs at R290 billion [$42 billion].”45 The letter to Webber Wentzel sets out the Griqua case in more detail: Ai) You are aware of what Griqua land/farms your company acquired for prospecting through the British Crown in the late eighteenth [sic] century. ii) It is a shame that you do not think it is important to negotiate a settlement with us. It is tragic that in this time of forgiveness you refuse to recognize the demands of the oppressed, and continue with your legal learning to deny the rights of our people. iii) Originally our claim against you was for ten percent of the 14.5 million carats of diamonds mined, which we calculated to be R8.7 billion [$1.4 billion]. Our research shows that on the third of August 1875 we bought back our farm from Mr. Alfred Ebden for one hundred thousand pounds. iv) The onus now rests on you to prove that our agreement with you was that we would receive only ten percent of income. We can now prove that we are the original owners of the farm through our government because:

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We leased [did not sell] the farm to the De Beers family in 1863, who were tenants with the right to use and enjoy the property. The De Beer family sold the farm to Mr. Alfred Ebden. b) Our government used tax-payers’ money on 03/08/1875 to buy the said land back from Mr. Ebden on behalf of the Griqua people. v)

The Registrar confirms that the Griqualand West government and thereafter the British Crown were trustees of the farm Vooruitzicht, and that the British Crown never transferred the farm or a portion of the farm to your company. It appears therefore that your company up until 1914 illegally and unjustly appropriated diamonds from our land out of the Big Hole Diamond Mine.46

The letter concludes with the insistence that the total income from the Big Hole Diamond Mine belongs to the Griqua People’s Organization. In addition to seeking recompense from De Beers, the Griqua People’s Organization has sued the British Crown. Spokesman William Willen explains the claim thus: We, the Griqua people of South Africa, hold the present British government responsible for damages from loss of life and property, bodily harm and physical and verbal abuse incurred during the seizing of our ancestral land in the Northern Cape and Orange Free State by the British. . . . The British robbed our ancestors of thousands of hectares of land. The Griqua people demand compensation for damages and want the land, where possible, to be transferred back to the descendants of the communities.47

The claims received wide media coverage and public sympathy.48 One letter to the editor in the Cape Argus captures the mood, declaring that “all South Africans should shout and cheer the Griqua people in their bid to sue De Beers and the British government for more than R18 billion in restitution and damages.”49 Despite the efforts of the Land Commission, the current political atmosphere of reconciliation, widespread public support, and encouraging historical evidence, only the most determined romantic would give the Griqua People’s Organization any hope of success in their claims against De Beers and the British government. In the first place, while there can be no disputing that the Griqua community of the Northern Cape has suffered catastrophic and ongoing loss, the fact that it occurred before the 1913 Land Act means that it falls outside the jurisdiction of the Land Commission. Second, the considerable resources, including access to “legal learning,” available to a massive mining multinational and the British government more than cancel out any moral advantage the Griqua might enjoy. Finally, Griqua land claims form part of a wider political project, which asserts a

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separate Griqua identity at odds with the “rainbow nation” myth favored by the ruling African National Congress. Does the vocabulary describing the experience of loss introduced by Freud add much to the Griqua struggles for restitution? As regards Freud’s definitions, Griqua land might indeed be mourned as the substitute for the “loss of a loved one.” Once the libidinal attachment to the object of love (land in this case) is lost, the subject (the Griqua) identifies with the object in a last-ditch attempt to preserve it internally and, in the process, assumes responsibility for the loss. There remain complications, however, the most obvious one being that land is not lost to the Griqua in quite the same way as a political activist killed by police is lost to her or his loved ones or political comrades. Mourning before a government-appointed commission might break the cycle of melancholia in the latter case, but to appear before such a commission to mourn the loss of land and at the same time claim continuous though interrupted ownership of said land conflates legal argument and moral appeal. Is it possible to mourn something that you want back? The victim of police violence cannot be returned, but theoretically at least land might be given back. This suggests a state of incomplete mourning, which stops short of melancholia, as the subjects actively and creatively seek to make good the loss suffered. OF THEORIZING

My efforts to theorize the loss of land in South Africa have produced disconnected fragments of theory that articulate only occasionally with the historical, political, and legal texts under scrutiny. One partial symmetry worth noting is that the split between Marx and Freud, between theories of “land” and “loss,” reverberates in the split between the labors of the Land Commission and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. For the Griqua, the major concern is material loss, and in this light, Marx’s ideas on land therefore appear more suggestive than Freud’s on personal loss. Despite qualifications, the general focus of Freud’s inquiry ultimately predisposes him to establish a hierarchy of loss, which elevates the loss of “a loved person” above all possible substitute love-objects, including land. It is arguable that a similar hierarchy is reproduced in South Africa, where the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has eclipsed in the public imagination the Land Commission’s attempts to address material loss. Without wanting to reverse this hierarchy (i.e., suggest that the loss of land is more traumatic than the loss of a loved one by police torture), I would argue that in addition to personal loss described by Freud, poor communities like the Griqua continue to suffer material loss. In addressing

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their experience of loss, the Griqua have chosen to prioritize the material struggle for land, trying to use the new laws to achieve restitution. Freud’s suggestion that “different identifications seize hold of consciousness in turn”50 might therefore be turned against the general tenor of his views, because it would appear that for the Griqua, an identification with land— not with a loved person—is currently dominant. The point, however, is not to end with an “either/or” that favors Marx over Freud or, indeed, to argue that the Land Commission is necessarily more important than the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Rather, it is to draw attention to the importance of historical contingency, both in determining political strategy and in theoretical preoccupations. Theories of loss emerge in tension with their context(s), and to suppress those context(s) is to privilege theory at the expense of history and politics. By the uncomfortable juxtaposition of theory and a range of competing discourses—legal, political, historical—I have tried in this essay to resist or at least complicate the assimilation of South African histories and struggles to the cadences of Western, or in this case North American, theoretical trajectories. NOTES

My thanks to Land Commission officials Glen Thompson and Franz Zottl for their generous help in providing documents and explaining the workings of the land restitution process to me, and also to Duncan Cartwright and the editors of this collection for astute comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. 1. Marx’s early views on the teleology of forms of landownership are most clearly set out in The German Ideology, where he argues that forms of landownership derive from the division of labor and proceed through four successive stages. The first stage is tribal ownership, which “corresponds to the undeveloped stage of production, at which a people lives by hunting and fishing, by the rearing of beasts or, in the highest stage, agriculture” (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, ed. C. J. Arthur [London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1970], 44). The second stage is ancient communal and state ownership, which proceeds “from the union of several tribes into a city by agreement or conquest” (44) and sees the beginnings of private property and the conflict between town and country. The third form of ownership is feudal or estate property, which consists “on the one hand of landed property with serf labour chained to it, and on the other of the labour of the individual with small capital commanding the labour of journeyman” (46). The transition to the fourth form of ownership is for Marx the most complex, and after a lengthy digression, he summarizes it as follows: “In the case of nations which grew up out of the Middle Ages, tribal property evolved through various stages—feudal landed property, corporative movable property, capital invested in manufacture—to modern capital, determined by big industry and universal competition, i.e. pure private property, which has cast off all semblance of a communal institution and has shut out the State from any influence on the development of property” (79). The im-

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petus for this transition to private property for Marx was the “the extension of commerce which came with the discovery of America and the sea-route to the East Indies” (74). And central in cementing its legitimacy was the adoption throughout western Europe of Roman civil law, which declared that “the existing property relationships are . . . the result of the general will” (81). In his introduction to Marx’s Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, Eric Hobsbawm assumes that with the exception of the European transition from feudalism to capitalism, Marx’s “stages” of social development should be understood analytically and not chronologically (see Karl Marx, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, ed. Eric Hobsbawm [London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1964], 36–38). 2. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ed. Ernest Mandel (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 915. 3. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, On Colonialism (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1959), 332. 4. Marx and Engels, On Colonialism, 336, emphasis in original. 5. Karl Marx, The First International and After: Political Writings, vol. 3, ed. David Fernbach (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), 212–13. 6. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 62; Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 83. 7. Marx, The First International, 267. 8. Marx’s early attitudes to the law of property are traced by Donald R. Kelley, who argues convincingly that “Marx’s first act of academic subversion was to turn Savigny, not Hegel, on his head” (Donald R. Kelley, “The Metaphysics of Law: An Essay on the Very Young Marx,” American Historical Review 83, no. 2 (1978): 350– 67, quotation on 358). In a careful analysis of Marx on property rights, Jean Axelrad Cahan extends Kelley’s arguments and identifies in Marx’s work a central distinction between economic and legal notions of property, where “property in the first or economic sense always historically precedes property in the second sense” ( Jean Axelrad Cahan, “The Concept of Property in Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense of the Autonomy of the Socioeconomic Base,” Science and Society 58, no. 3 (1994– 95): 392–414, quotation on 393. 9. Marx, The First International, 344. 10. Teodor Shanin, ed., Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and the Peripheries of Capitalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), 98. 11. Shanin, Late Marx, 124. 12. Shanin, Late Marx, 113. 13. Shanin, Late Marx, 121. 14. Sigmund Freud, On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, vol. 11 of The Penguin Freud Library, ed. Angela Richards (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 251. 15. Freud, On Metapsychology, 251–52. 16. Freud, On Metapsychology, 254. 17. Freud, On Metapsychology, 367. 18. Freud, On Metapsychology, 370. 19. Freud, On Metapsychology, 370. 20. In the context of Europe in the 1990s, Freud’s reflections on loss and mourning have been elaborated by a number of theorists, notably Jacques Derrida

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and Gillian Rose. Derrida takes up Freud’s focus on the “loss of a loved one” in “Mourning and Melancholia” in writing about the death of his friend Louis Marin in “The Force of Mourning” (Critical Inquiry 22 [1996]: 171–92). And in The Gift of Death (trans. David Wills [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996]), he discusses the story of Abraham and Isaac. He also ponders “the loss of some abstraction” (International Marxism) in Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (trans. Peggy Kamuf [London: Routledge, 1994]). The loss of a “loved person”—the assassinated South African Communist Party leader Chris Hani—is invoked in the dedication for Specters of Marx, but the object-identification of Derrida’s argument is Marx and his fate in western Europe in the 1990s. Where Freud in “Mourning and Melancholia” suggests that in the case of mourning “we rely on its being overcome after a certain lapse of time” (Derrida, Specters, 252), for Derrida mourning loss is interminable, “mourning in fact and by right interminable, without possible normality, without reliable limit, in its reality or in its concept” (Derrida, Specters, 97). Rose too has taken up Freud’s arguments about loss and mourning, reflecting in Love’s Work (London: Vintage, 1997) on the loss of a loved one and on her own struggle with terminal cancer as well as attacking in Mourning Becomes the Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) postmodern narratives of loss, particularly those proclaiming the loss of abstractions like International Marxism and reason. In Mourning Becomes the Law, Rose impatiently dismisses Derrida’s extension of Freud’s notion of mourning to the idea of mourning without limit. She argues that Specters of Marx “is no work of mourning: it remains baroque melancholia immersed in the world of soulless and unredeemed bodies, which affords a vision that is far more disturbing than the salvific distillation of disembodied ‘spirit’ or ‘spectre.’ For if all human law is sheer violence, if there is no positive or symbolic law to be acknowledged . . . then there can be no work, no exploring of the legacy of ambivalence, working through the contradictory emotions aroused by bereavement. . . . This is aberrated, not inaugurated mourning” (Rose, Mourning, 70). In relation to Freud, Rose is therefore rather more scrupulous than Derrida in following his distinction between mourning and melancholia, though she shares with Derrida a sense of the necessary connection between the experience of loss and the appeal of the law. 21. Freud, On Metapsychology, 252. 22. Freud, On Metapsychology, 253. 23. Derrida’s discussion of the economic as metaphor in relation to Marx (briefly), Nietzsche, and Saussure in Margins of Philosophy (trans. Alan Bass [Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1984], 219–23) provides a suggestive way into Freud’s notion of an economics of pain. 24. The papers include: a copy of the title deeds conceding a perpetual quitrent on the farm Vooruitzicht to the De Beer brothers on December 27, 1863, and signed by the president of the Orange Free State; a copy of the deed of sale transferring Vooruitzicht from D. A. De Beer (on July 31, 1871) and J. N. De Beer (on August 4, 1871) to the merchant Alfred Ebden for sixty-six hundred pounds; and a copy of Proclamation No. 71 of October 27, 1871, drawn up by commissioners of the British government John Campbell and John Cyprian Thompson declaring: “We the undersigned commissioners . . . proclaim a certain area, being portion of the said farm De Beers’ or Vooruitzicht . . . to be public diamond fields” (Great Britain,

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Colonial Office [hereafter abbreviated as CO], Correspondence relating to disputed land claims in Griqualand West, 879/7/61, 1875, p. 59). 25. CO, Correspondence . . . disputed land claims, pp. 63–64. 26. CO, Correspondence . . . disputed land claims, p. 77. 27. Writing in the spirit of Marx, legal historian Richard Waswo sums up his wide-ranging survey of the relation between natural law and colonial expansion in the seventeenth century as follows: “Produce a universal principle [natural law], claiming its grounds in Roman law and finding precedents in myth, that will . . . justify the dispossession of the indigenes” (“The Formation of Natural Law to Justify Colonialism, 1539–1689,” New Literary History 27, no. 4 [1996]: 743–59, quotation on 746). 28. CO, Correspondence . . . disputed land claims, p. 86. 29. CO, Correspondence . . . disputed land claims, p. 93. 30. CO, Correspondence . . . disputed land claims, p. 96. 31. CO, Correspondence . . . disputed land claims, p. 97. 32. CO, Correspondence . . . disputed land claims, p. 99. There were at the time voices in Britain that protested against the annexing of the Kimberley diamond fields. In a lecture by R. S. Watson entitled “The History of English Rule and Policy in South Africa” and published in 1879 in Newcastle by the Transvaal Independence Committee, British policy is fiercely criticized: “We stole the land from the Dutch in the first place, and then got a sham title to it by giving Nicholas Waterboer, the Kaffir, a life annuity of £1000 for it. . . . In this matter of wrong-doing in South Africa neither of our political parties have clean hands” (R. S. Watson, The History of English Rule and Policy in South Africa [Newcastle: Transvaal Independence Committee, 1879], 16). 33. CO, Correspondence . . . disputed land claims, p. 148. 34. CO, Correspondence . . . disputed land claims, p. 148. 35. Great Britain, CO, Correspondence respecting the affairs of Griqualand West and neighbouring native tribes, 879/7/74, 1875, pp. 105–6. 36. CO, Correspondence . . . affairs of Griqualand West, p. 109. 37. Great Britain, CO, Further correspondence respecting the affairs of Griqualand West and the diamond fields, 879/8/76, 1875, p. 39. The struggles of white mine-workers in the Kimberley mines of the late 1870s are described in detail in Ken Smith, Alfred Aylward: The Tireless Agitator ( Johannesburg: Juta, 1973); Inez Sutton, “The Diggers’ Revolt in Griqualand West, 1875,” International Journal of Historical Studies 12 (1981): 40–61; Robert V. Turrell, Capital and Labour on the Kimberley Diamond Fields, 1871–1890 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); and William H. Worger, South Africa’s City of Diamonds: Mine Workers and Monopoly Capitalism in Kimberley, 1867–1895 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). 38. For example, David Harvey’s useful summary of the four different forms of rent theorized in Marx simply does not countenance the possibility that colonized peoples might be in a position at all comparable to “landlords” (David Harvey, The Limits of Capital [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982], 349–62). Waterboer’s defensive appeals for rent therefore fall outside Marx’s range of knowledge, though the fate of Griqua pleas for landlord status suggests that in this instance strictly legal considerations were swept aside by imperial economic imperatives. Anthropologists have

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in recent years drawn attention to the differences in conceptions of land in European law and in non-Western societies. For a good example of this kind of research, which engages with Marx’s notions of property in relation to those of the North American Blackfeet, see David Nugent, “Property Relations, Production Relations, and Inequality: Anthropology, Political Economy, and the Blackfeet,” American Ethnologist 20, no. 2 (1993): 336–62. 39. The novelty of this legislation should be acknowledged. In recent years, both in Australia and in North America, the land rights of colonized communities have also been given limited recognition. Such recognition remains exceptional, however, and the prevailing legal opinion in North America at least continues to be the one expressed by Justice John Marshall in the 1843 U.S. case of Johnson v. McIntosh: “We will not enter into the controversy, whether agriculturalists, merchants and manufacturers, have a right, on abstract principles, to expel hunters from the territory they possess, or to contract their limits. Conquest gives a title which the courts of the conqueror cannot deny, whatever the private and speculative opinions of individuals may be, respecting the original justice of the claim which has been successfully asserted” (quoted in Thomas Flanagan, “The Agricultural Argument and Original Appropriation: Indian Lands and Political Philosophy,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 22, no. 3 (1989): 589–602, quotation on 589). On the legalities of competing forms of landownership in South Africa, see C. Lewis, “The Right to Private Property in a New Political Dispensation in South Africa,” South African Journal of Human Rights 8 (1992): 1039–70; and D. van der Merwe, “Land Tenure in South Africa: A Brief History and some Reform Proposals,” Tydskrif vir Suid-Afrikaanse Reg (1989): 663–97. 40. Rose, Mourning, 70. 41. Quoted in Ann Eveleth, “Land Restitution Lags Behind,” Mail and Guardian, December 12–18, 1997, p. 12. Seremane was fired at the beginning of 1999 by Land Minister Derek Hanekom, principally because of very slow delivery by the Land Commission, and was replaced by Wallace Mgoqi. Hanekom himself was replaced by his deputy minister Thoka Didiza in Thabo Mbeki’s first cabinet after the elections of June 1999. I have drawn details of this information from the regularly updated web site, which reports in detail on the process of land restitution: http:// land.pwv.gov.za/; and from Cheryl Walker, “Relocating Restitution,” Transformation 44 (2000): 1–16. 42. The Griqua themselves had acquired ownership of the land where the farm Vooruitzicht was mapped in the early nineteenth century, when they drove off communities of South Tswana farmers. For this history, see Martin Legassick, “The Northern Frontier to c. 1840: The Rise and Decline of the Griqua People,” in The Shaping of Southern African Society, 1652–1820, ed. Richard Elphick and Hermann Giliomee (Cape Town: David Philip, 1989), 358–420; and Robert Ross, Adam Kok’s Griquas: A Study in the Development of Stratification in South Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). 43. Not all Griqua political groups agree with the strategy adopted by the Griqua People’s Organization. Commenting on the GPO’s lawsuit against the British Crown and De Beers, the head of the much bigger Griqua National Conference, Cecil Le Fleur, for example, argues: “The problem is not that we don’t have the same aims. We just think their move was premature and irresponsible. We have to take more

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time to study these things” (quoted by Ruaridh Nicoll in “Sons of Hottentots Sue Queen over South Africa Land Grab,” Observer, October 20, 1996, p. 19). In a critical article, journalist John Matshikiza also casts doubt upon the political wisdom of the land claims put forward by the Griquas of Griquatown (see Matshikiza, “In Search of the Griqua . . . and Their Real Leader,” Mail and Guardian, May 27, 1999, pp. 30– 31). Finally, it is worth noting that on November 18, 1998, descendants of another branch of the Griqua nation—the one hundred families making up the Bethany community of the Orange Free State—had their land returned to them in a ceremony presided over by then-minister Derek Hanekom (for details, see the South African Land Commission official web site, http://land.pwv.gov.za/). 44. There have been several histories of De Beers and its founding magnates, from the hagiographic (see, for example, Theodore Gregory, Ernest Oppenheimer and the Economic Development of Southern Africa [Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1962]) to the more critical (see, for example, Robert I. Rotberg, The Founder: Cecil Rhodes and the Pursuit of Power [New York: Oxford University Press, 1988]). Notwithstanding the differences within this tradition of South African history-writing, Charles Van Onselen’s criticism of it is worth repeating: “In the midst of an industrial revolution [these historians] have tiptoed through the tree-lined avenues of the northern suburbs, peering into the homes and lifestyles of the ‘Randlords,’ attempting to put a romantic gloss on the ceaseless pursuit of wealth at a time when, elsewhere in the city, the dusty streets were bursting at the seams with a seething mass of struggling humanity” (Van Onselen, Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand, vol. 1 [Johannesburg: Ravan, 1982], xv). 45. Unpublished submission by the Griqua People’s Organization to the Land Commission of the Western Cape; my translation. 46. Unpublished submission by the GPO; my translation. 47. William-Mervin Gumede, “Griquas Launch Bid for Land Justice: Group Sues British Government and De Beers for Restitution,” Cape Argus, October 12, 1996, p. 3. 48. Griqua land claims against the British Crown were covered in detail in the English press, with an unsympathetic report by Robert Block in the Sunday Times (“‘Robbed’ Tribe Sues the Queen,” October 20, 1996, p. 26) and a more nuanced one by Ruaridh Nicoll in the Observer (“Sons of Hottentots,” October 20, 1996, p. 19). 49. Shaun Rack, letter to the editor, Cape Argus, October 20, 1996, p. 4. 50. Freud, On Metapsychology, 370.

Charity Scribner

Left Melancholy

“What I never had, is being torn from me. What I did not live, I will miss forever.” With these lines from his drama Property (Das Eigentum, 1990), playwright Volker Braun renders his melancholic reaction to the disintegration of the German Democratic Republic. The GDR once prided itself as the tenth strongest world economy, but following the postcommunist turn, or Wende, most of its industries have been brought to a halt, and hundreds of thousands have found themselves jobless. The euphoria at the opening of the Berlin Wall dimmed within a few months, and a pall seemed to set in over the two Germanys, one which prompted many to reconsider the disintegration of state socialism. Whereas most Germans considered the communist project a failure, many others proceeded to mourn its passing, nonetheless. Paradoxically, what Braun’s protagonist lost with the collapse of communism was the possible past he never really had. The mass perception of loss has elicited a memory crisis in contemporary culture. While retrospective literary texts and artworks proliferate, museum exhibitions salvage and curate the wreckage of the GDR as if there were literally no tomorrow. A new German word has surfaced to describe this trend: Ostalgie, derived from Nostalgie, or nostalgia. The first syllable drops the letter n to become ost, the word for east. What remains signifies something like nostalgia for the “eastern times” of state socialism. Yet the nostalgic longing for some home that, perhaps, never really existed distinguishes itself from two other modes of memory that charge postcommunist culture: mourning and melancholia. Conceptual artist Joseph Beuys, curator Andreas Ludwig, and playwright Judith Kuckart have joined in the conversation about how to commemorate communism; each of their works embodies a distinct mnemonic mode. If Beuys’s installation Economic Values (Wirtschaftswerte) returns to the fixity of nostalgia, Ludwig’s Open Depot, a 300

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museum of products from the obsolete GDR industries, must be something else. It does not languish in nostalgic opprobrium but, rather, enacts the tender rejection of mourning. This gesture sets it apart from Kuckart’s Melancholie I, oder Die zwei Schwestern (Melancholia I, or The Two Sisters), a drama that places both communism and love under the sign of Saturn. Read together, these three works not only chart the politics of memory; they also elaborate the ethical crux between mourning and melancholia. In 1996 Kuckart, a West German, staged Melancholie I at the Berliner Ensemble, the theater founded by Bertolt Brecht and later directed by Heiner Müller. For this production Kuckart fast-forwarded figures central to the historical avant-garde—Lili Brik, Elsa Triolet, and Vladimir Mayakovsky—into the chaotic cityscape of postunification Berlin. The drama renews the convulsive frisson of surrealism and marries it with the specters of communism. Unlike Kuckart, Beuys and Ludwig rewind their memory tracks, picking up samples of the GDR past like so many found objects. In an attempt to harness the hopeful energies that Marxism sought to fuel, Beuys (also a Westerner) installs products of state socialist manufacture in the space of the West German museum. Later Ludwig, a former Easterner, would make a similar attempt to recollect the vanishing traces of GDR material culture. But his Open Depot serves a different purpose: instead of stilling memory, the museum sets it in motion, carefully. It establishes a critical public space for the Germans who were annexed into the larger German federation to gather together and mark their own time. It is with regard to the lost object of the GDR that Kuckart, Beuys, and Ludwig diverge. WHAT REMAINS

“Again already? You’re always remembering something. Haven’t you anything better to do?”1 Reclining on a lounge placed near a shrouded monument, Lili Brik chides her sister Elsa Triolet for her sentimental propensities. Elsa’s vague reveries, she suggests, are the sullen products of melancholia’s lethargic affliction. The next scene of Melancholie I reinforces this point. A (presumably underemployed) middle-aged couple from the eastern town of Magdeburg languish outside the department store Karstadt and listlessly enjoin one another in conversation. The efforts which the “he” and “she” of Kuckart’s couple make to communicate with one another are only half-hearted and often misfire. Because the woman’s first utterances—“So where are the Russians?” “Didn’t there used to be a red flag hanging there?”—are scarcely understood by her husband, they impart a sense of the absurd to their exchange. Continuing along this trajectory, she asks him a question that seems to lack any clear referent: “Where did you lose that?” The audience is left to puzzle over the import of the de-

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monstrative pronoun that, which could refer to the Russians, the red flag, the department store, or even the streetcar, which, the woman notes, now frequents a nearby stop half as often as it did zu Ostzeiten, or during the eastern times of the GDR.2 Soon it appears that the woman herself does not know after what she is asking: She: I would have seen it there when I was leaving. He: What? She: Your thingamabob. He: So what. She: But I didn’t see it. He: Where? She: On the refrigerator.

The Magdeburgers’ confusion about their loss marks them as melancholics. Freud maintains that the melancholic grasps his condition “only in the sense that he knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him.”3 The incoherence that manifests at the moment of depressive collapse could thus be “translated” into these terms: before knowing what is missing, I know that I’m missing “I know not what”: “Your thingamabob,” the Magdeburger calls it.4 Dein Dingsda, in German; not quite a thing, nor entirely an object, the matter at hand thwarts her attempts at both designation and concretization. As the scene progresses, the very question of whether anything was lost at all becomes nebulous. Yet it is the amorphousness of this loss that lends this interlude its complexity and significance. In “The New Opacity: The Crisis of the Welfare State and the Exhaustion of Utopian Energies,” Jürgen Habermas identifies this sort of befuddlement as one of the traits that defined European cultures on both sides of the Iron Curtain as early as the 1980s.5 The disorientation produced by the eclipse of social solidarity has, in part, induced the museum fever raging across Europe. Why such a fixation on the past?6 Melancholie I reframes this question, asking what we imagine ourselves to have lost and how we lost it. The difficulty here— suggested by the Magdeburgers in their obtuse exchange as well as by scholars and critics who are currently examining the shifts in European cultural production—can be seen as a symptom of posthistorical melancholia. Andreas Ludwig maintains the conviction that he knows what is being lost in the process of German unification: the material residues of “real existing socialism.” The puttering, but reliable, Trabant automobile. Quickcooking Tempo Lentils, formulated for the working mother. Grids of prefab apartment blocks that radiated ever farther from industrial centers from the 1950s to the 1980s. All these were manufactured by the “people’s own

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industries,” or Volkseigene Betriebe (VEB). They also document the history of the former East Germany, a lifeworld that is mutating beyond recognition. In December 1996 Ludwig established the Open Depot, a museum that collects and exhibits everyday objects produced and consumed in the former GDR. Located in the former model industrial city of Eisenhüttenstadt, the Open Depot draws heavily from its urban surroundings, bringing the everyday right into the calm of the museum gallery.7 It takes up residence in the colossal Living Complex, which was built just after World War II; the nursery building that houses the exhibition spaces fell into disuse after unification when birthrates plummeted. Now living a kind of life after death, the Open Depot struggles to smooth different cultural moments into place. With the influx of Western consumer goods in the postunification period, many residents of Eisenhüttenstadt have chosen to outfit their homes and workplaces with upgraded furnishings and appliances. Now, on trash collection days, the sidewalks of Eisenhüttenstadt are littered with the once standard-issue possessions that have been cast off in order to make room for more up-to-date wares. Yet for some Eisenhüttenstadters, this gesture of jettisoning the outmoded seems to be arduous; supplanting the trusty old family radio with a Japanese-made stereo system is a freighted act for them. So, instead of leaving the radio, the face of which bears the names of satellite radio stations in distant Bucharest and Minsk, to wait for the sanitation workers, some Eisenhüttenstadters opt to bequeath these artifacts to Ludwig’s Open Depot. In the acquisition process, a group of museum staff, trained by Ludwig in the methods of oral history, interview the donators, posing questions not only about the provenance of the objects but also about the owners’ memories of the way they once lived with them or among them. Each artifact, then, is coupled with the institutional record of a memory—in this way it becomes a bearer of the past. Although the interview records have yet to be made accessible to the public, much of the collection is open to view, as are the densely inscribed guest books where visitors write their responses and, equally important, reflect upon the thoughts of those who have come before them.8 In the same vein as certain provincial museums of popular culture, such as a small host of French sites maintained by curators schooled in the Annales tradition, the Open Depot sets memory work into play on a human scale by concentrating on household objects. By amassing and displaying these mundane artifacts, Ludwig creates a space not only where viewers can come together to debate their past and future but also where they can identify and insert their private lives, their own memories of countless tiny details, into the larger timeline of German history. It is easy to dismiss the Open Depot as so much retrograde nostalgia, as many critics have done, or perhaps to see this museum as the anesthetic to the most painful symp-

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Bathroom Installation, installation view, the Open Depot, curated by Andreas Ludwig, 1997 (photograph by Alan Chin)

toms of the absorption of the GDR into a market economy, where rage and despair are conveniently encrypted, segregated from the rest of life, submerged into the unspeakable. But on closer examination, can it not also be argued that this place of reckoning might set the stage for a requiem for communism in this moment of transition? That it is a site for mourning? Rather than diagnosing the Open Depot as the fetishization of a diseased past, perhaps we can regard it in a more positive light. For not only does it remind viewers of Germany’s divided history, a history determined by the crimes of fascism and totalitarianism, this exhibition also helps to concretize the work of memory for the successes and failures of the socialist project. Instead of anxiously hoarding GDR relics in their own homes or sentencing them to oblivion, Eastern Germans are setting them apart, laying them to rest by installing them in the museum environment. A kind of tender rejection, the growing desire to support and visit these museums can be seen in contradistinction to both nostalgia and melancholia. In 1980 Joseph Beuys made an artwork that prefigured the Open Depot in an uncanny way. His Economic Values (Wirtschaftswerte) is an assemblage that combines a collection of household objects and ephemera predominantly of East European manufacture with a small sculpture made earlier by Beuys. A set of slightly askew metal shelves define the shape and dimen-

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Joseph Beuys, Economic Values (Wirtschaftswerte), 1980, installation view, Documenta IX exhibition, 1992 (䉷 2002 Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York/ VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn)

sions of the installation; stocked on each of the shelves are items of basic necessity, such as staple foods and simple tools. Many of these products would later feature in the vitrines of the Open Depot. Yet Beuys’s handling confers the objects with a different status: he attempts to glean some transformative force from them. At the same time, his touch imbues them with the patina of age, sending the GDR quotidian hurtling back into history. The past is another country. If Ludwig seeks to place his found objects in a specific place on a real historical timeline, Beuys succumbs to a nostalgia that manifests itself at one remove from actual lived experience. Economic Values attracted the attention of the Belgian curator Jan Hoet, who used the installation to catalyze the international art exhibition Documenta IX in 1992. In the wake of the GDR’s dissolution, Hoet organized Documenta IX around the theme of “Collective Memory” and ran it as a kind of conceptual lost-and-found department for the remainders of state socialism. Although the various catalog essays that Hoet edited express what seems to be relief that the many injustices committed under the GDR regime were finally being redressed, they nevertheless reveal a certain nostalgic disappointment with the outcome of the Wende. Like the bewildered

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Magdeburgers in Kuckart’s drama, Hoet seems fixated on the notion that something was lost in the transition from a continent divided between the market and the plan to the hegemonic Europe of late capitalism. What was the “Other Europe?” And why might some Westerners have grown dependent on the notion that there exists something elsewhere beyond liberal democracy? With regard to these matters, Hoet drives home the point that you never know what you have until you lose it. Perhaps this explains his interest in taking stock of the socialist experiment conducted in the name of Marx. Although Beuys made Economic Values well before the final death throes of Soviet-style socialism, Hoet was quick to consider the work a statement about the ends of ideology. He describes the installation as a testimonial to the waning, but subversive, force of the socialist alternative, a current that Western Europe could tap into if it would only divest itself of its will to domination. Beuys’s work, for him, has served as a kind of lifesaver that would buoy up the shipwreck of late capitalism; the “energy symbols” collected on its shelves (basic groceries such as pulses, porridge, margarine, and butter) offer the promise of sustenance. Beuys himself characterized the design of the products he displayed as that of Behelfsverpackung, that is, the sort of provisional or makeshift packaging used in situations of duress, such as those produced for military and relief operations.9 Well before conceiving Economic Values, Beuys had created works that spoke of the need to heal the wounded civilization of postwar Germany, but none of these had identified Eastern Europe as the agent or accomplice of such a recovery. In this installation Beuys sets the accent squarely on the “Easternness” of the found objects he selects.10 To Western eyes (to date, the piece has been exhibited only in Western Europe), Economic Values offers an ethnographic glimpse of what Beuys considered the quaint material culture of the other Europe.11 Beuys emphasized that the apparent simplicity of the goods assembled on the shelves betrays an inner richness and complexity and links the installation to the aesthetics of arte povera, but still it is clear that he imagines Economic Values as a bridge to Germany’s “lost” other. Key for Beuys was the purported “biological purity” of the Eastern goods as well as the principles of recycling, which he presumed were prominent in the minds of the manufacturers.12 But if these were the only messages Beuys wanted to convey, he need not have procured packages of Eastern provenance. The selection process for Economic Values was actually quite deliberate. Since Beuys himself spent little time in the Eastern bloc, he relied on colleagues to ferry to his studio products manufactured by the state socialist industries. From a massive collection of donated wares, Beuys selected only those that looked the most superannuated; he passed over any that evidenced the traces of sophisticated Western marketing strategies in favor of

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those packed in coarse, unbleached paper, printed with a single color or perhaps two. Scant ornamentation accompanies the text stenciled onto the packing materials; in some cases all that is written is the name of the good— “Millet” or “Honey.” Beuys’s way of seeing these objects was, on the one hand, similar to the way a mourner regards a relic and, on the other hand, quite different. Like a mourner’s relic, these objects, in themselves, are only trivial remainders, almost absurd. But, beheld by a mourner, a proper relic takes on another meaning; it is instilled with the power to signify the death of the loved one and, moreover, to ward off his return. According to this reliquary logic, the mourner can appropriate the property of the mourned only if he really is dead and gone. Economic Values has little to do with the task of laying something to rest, however; since Beuys’s knowledge of these objects is second-hand, his installation does not preserve them as relics but rather fashions them as false souvenirs. To mourn, Freud argues in Totem and Taboo, is to kill off the dead: “Die Toten töten.” 13 If the mourner strikes the coup de grâce that brings about the second death of the mourned, then the nostalgic steals something, some object, from its rightful owner, leaving him in the lurch.14 This distinction lays plain the difference between Economic Values and the Open Depot: if Beuys is a thief, Ludwig is a merciful killer. Kuckart, herself, is a borrower of sorts: she appropriates the title of her play from Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Melencolia I (1514), an icon of acedia, contemplation, and stillness. Digging deeply into the bed of melancholy, her drama both opposes the ossifying nostalgia of Economic Values and resists the drive toward psychic execution that compels Ludwig’s work of mourning. Kuckart seems moved to summon forth the erotic charge latent in Dürer’s masterpiece. Her melancholia is a condition of displaced love, a mode of memory more ethical than mourning, for it sustains respect for alterity. Like Giorgio Agamben, Kuckart detects the contiguity of melancholy and love. Her Mayakovsky character cites from the real Mayakovsky’s poetry and remarks, “My desire hangs on you like lead”; the character seems to embody many of the same tensions that Agamben identifies in his study of melancholic eros. Against Saturn and Melancholy (1964), the definitive reading of Dürer’s engraving, written by Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl,15 Agamben argues that the winged genius depicted in the work is engaged in a singular, dialectical exchange between mnemonic cognition and concupiscence. Memory folds over onto desire in Melancholie I when Elsa interrupts a conversation about surrealist poetry with an early childhood memory, one that privileges the most erotically charged details. Perched on Mayakovsky’s lap, she begins to writhe. She dredges up her earliest recollection of him— the time (she was very small, he was in his twenties) when he told her to heed the calling of a writer. The traditional contemplative vocation of the

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melancholic reveals itself in this image as vulnerable to what Giorgio Agamben calls “a violent disturbance of desire menacing it from within.”16 Kuckart’s Mayakovsky will become the modernist incarnation of these tensions, the suicidal subject of two failures: that of love and that of communism. Although as a child Elsa had not understood the sexual connection that resonated between her and Mayakovsky, now her body remembers. In retrospect she perceives the first spark of her passionate commitment to the revolution. If this scene recalls the profane illumination of Walter Benjamin’s surrealist aesthetics, Kuckart’s larger critique of the Left’s tendency to withdraw from the revolutionary front recalls his 1931 essay, “Left-Wing Melancholy.” Here Benjamin inveighs upon the writings of Erich Kästner in order, on a wider scale, to denounce the indecision and sloth that appeared to beset intellectuals in the 1930s—an epidemic that, he contends, produced fashions instead of schools, cliques instead of parties, and agents instead of producers.17 A Marxist with melancholic proclivities, Benjamin offers one of his most important insights: the gaze we cast back onto horrors and failures is not part of a debilitating fixation on the past but rather a source of redemptive hope. Yet he also opposed this “authentically” revolutionary longing to the feigned melancholia of the Left. His indictment of Kästner’s writing could be extended to Beuys’s nostalgia trip: both transform revolutionary resistance into so many objects of tasteful appreciation. Beuys, at some level, acknowledges and accepts that the GDR and the rest of the Soviet bloc were doomed to extinguish themselves in the near future. Yet despite this recognition—or rather precisely because of it—he affixes himself to this lost object all the more, investing himself into the project of making the loss his own. Although the nostalgic might not possess what he wants, he is spellbound by the object’s absence. The object (real socialism) does not fail the nostalgic (Beuys); he possesses it in the very depth of his loss, a place where he lulls himself with incantations of longing. “I love you. You are a part of me.” Extending Benjamin’s “bad” melancholia onto Beuys’s nostalgic indulgence clarifies the distinction between these two modes of memory. The nostalgic refuses to kill off the lost object; he steels himself against the work of mourning. We can maintain that the nostalgic confounds loss and lack: he interprets the original lack as the loss of something that he previously possessed.18 Consequently, Agamben’s claim that melancholia presents “an intention to mourn that precedes and anticipates the loss of the object” would actually render the fundamental stratagem of nostalgia.19 Beuys, for example, feigned mourning for the GDR even before it was completely lost; here the nostalgic’s refusal of mourning metastasizes into funerary excess and artifice. If the nostalgic affixes himself to the object’s loss, then the melancholic, in contradistinction, focuses on the lack that always in-

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hered in the primordial lost object.20 The melancholic does not strive to recapture the lost object but, rather, aims at the lack that already resided within it. This mind-set determines the melancholic’s tendency toward repetition, as we see in Melancholie I: Kuckart’s characters harbor no nostalgia for the past but rather the compulsion to return to the sites of their failures. Reflecting upon the perceptions of “posthistorical” loss, Beuys and Kuckart open up memory channels that lead away from Ludwig’s austere mourning. Yet although Economic Values and Melancholie I cover some of the same ground, Kuckart digs deeper into the bed of postcommunist culture and imagines a way to gain traction during the lulls of melancholy. Beuys, meanwhile occupies himself with the nostalgic task of sustaining the vestiges of socialism, leaving his installation at a standstill. The difference between them comes into view at three points of intersection: their visual perspectives on the GDR and the Soviet bloc, their takes on Eastern time, and their representations of communism as a lost object. LEADEN DESIRE

In his 1990 article “Linke Trauerarbeit” (Leftist Mourning), Helmut Dubiel picks up where Benjamin leaves off, criticizing leftist intellectuals, particularly those from Western Europe, who romanticize the image of state socialism, even after 1989, and so cannot properly mourn the regime’s collapse.21 Although few Westerners had accurate impressions of life under socialism, Dubiel argues, they remained dependent upon the notion that there should exist some alternative to the liberal democracies that, they perceived, were thoroughly tainted by capitalism. Kuckart sees this romanticized image of the East not only in contemporary culture but projecting back to the first decades of the twentieth century, when the surrealists translated the Communist Manifesto into their own idiom of subversive intent. In scene 1 of Melancholie I, Elsa recalls the political and erotic energies that lay deep in the cultural divide between the concept of Paris and that of Moscow. As a Parisian with strong connections to the East, she knew that her reputation as “the chic Russian revolutionary” afforded her great social leverage. She claims to have used the “bait” of Stalinism to lure Louis Aragon’s love, making the couple into the most admired in Paris. Their liaison is “a monolith,” all the rage among Parisians, who prefer to regard revolutionary action from a safe distance. For the radical chic, the revolution is something to be looked at (“Come on, we’re going to watch the revolution”), not something with which to engage. Only when some kind of distance—either temporal or spatial—intervenes does the revolutionary project maintain its aura. Elsa asserts this in scene 9, when she addresses a waitress, invoking her as a stand-in for Aragon. “ ‘Up close the revolution looks—unpleasant. Yes, unpleasant, if I say so myself. But from a chaise

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longue in Paris, the revolution is an Event, a Sensation, a splendid aesthetic feeling that arouses you. Aragon, play along!’ ” In response, the stand-in sticks a small red flag in her hair. Whence, Kuckart makes us ask, comes the appeal of revolutionary action? Elsa knows: the revolution is a lover whose absence makes the heart grow fonder.22 Economic Values casts the viewer’s gaze decidedly eastward, yet since Beuys fails to establish any degree of critical distance, it remains in the grip of nostalgia. Beuys once explained that his attraction to the products of state socialist industry lay in the “voluptuous creativity” that they embodied; Müller concurred, describing GDR material culture as a sort of “treasure trove” (Fundgrube) in which Beuys could explore and indulge his “material sensitivities.”23 Despite the actual uniformity of state socialist industrial design (of which Beuys, as a result of his selection of the most austere packages, seems well aware), Müller implies that it is the Western object world that remains limited within the orbit of a monoculture. Hoet, on the other hand, recalls his experiences in the Eastern bloc as “powerfully melancholic”; he describes life there as a “physical correlative to melancholy,” a mode in which “you learn something about depression.”24 What he mistakes for melancholia is actually nostalgia. For Hoet and Beuys alike, it is precisely this depressive aspect of life in the East that offers an alternative to the false dynamism of global capital. Economic Values seems to operate as a portrait of the West’s own exhaustion. The way out of this impasse, they imply, is to look at the failures of the Other Europe. A study of loss, the installation remains a sullen warehouse of found objects, an archive of disparate data bereft of any compelling historical narrative. It is not that Beuys refuses to acknowledge the failure (then in progress) of the regime that produced the wares he installs; in actuality he accepts this failure, this loss, so wholly that he remains attached to the GDR not in spite of its failure but because of it. This accords with the matter of preservation and decay that Beuys articulates in Economic Values. Over time, the contents of the packages he had collected began to spoil or slowly disappear, often as a result of pestilence; according to his colleagues, the products’ ostensible purity delighted Beuys, since it affirmed that they had not been treated with preservatives. The packaging proved nearly as evanescent, quickly fading and disintegrating, even in the carefully controlled museum climate. As a measure of conservation, Beuys decided to replace the perishing edibles with more durable mixtures of sand and chalk powder that preserved the impression of weight and volume within the containers. This substitution goes against the grain of reliquary logic, for a proper relic, Fédida insists, cannot be thrown away, just as it can no longer circulate in an exchange economy. It has been rendered useless. That the fillers eventually began to leach out from the packages, depositing aureoles of dust

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around their bases, one might suspect, was intentional, since Beuys instructed the curators not to disturb this process. Perhaps he chose the sand and chalk amalgams precisely because they would be more slowly dispersed by the ebb and flow of the museum’s internal atmosphere. Forestalling sedimentation, Economic Values holds its objects deep in its heart, where they seem both to live and to die, just beyond the edge of time. The dust trundling below the packet of lentils takes on a life of its own, making the work paradoxically immortal in its own death, emanating like a halo of decay. Economic Values and the related exchanges among Beuys, Müller, and Hoet disclose nostalgia in a number of modes. In spite of the GRD’s drab reality, the three nonetheless imagine it to embody the utopian potential of a “more authentic” existence. Here Beuys and his devotees idealize the East, not for what it was, but for what it was not, for its nonrealized potential. Müller, meanwhile, appreciates state socialism for its very immobility. He discerns a profound intensity in what he calls the “waiting-room mentality” of the GDR: the constant anticipation of the socialist messiah, which, in fact, everyone knew would never come.25 Finally, loss as such attracts morbid fascination: even as it lived, East Germany was already a site of social and material decay. Far from ideal, the GDR only symbolized utopian aspirations but never achieved them. This potential may have been just a point of reference, but its very emptiness provided a space for the phenomenological experience that Müller privileges. If the material of this existence perished all too quickly, it nonetheless could be elevated into an object worthy of our attention, even one that would whet our dark desire. This ties off the thread running through the four modes of nostalgia: ultimately, the lure of looking east lies in the suspicion that the Other Europe was always moldering away. From dust to dust. Kuckart also takes up the problem of waiting in her drama, but she extends the delays of real socialism into the post-Wende years; what she calls the “in-between time” subtends both cultural moments. Although a good deal of the action within Melancholie I seems to take place in the early decades of this century, Kuckart’s references to contemporary events create a sort of historical montage effect, such that the two “ends” of state socialism alternately juxtapose and blend with one another. In scene 7, set in the Moscow Hotel Lux, a reserve of the nomenklatura, one character announces that the drama will undertake a temporal leap (Zeitsprung) into the 1990s. Figures from contemporary Central and Eastern Europe gather together in the hotel lounge with Mayakovsky, Elsa, and Lili; a life-sized video image of Glenn Gould playing “A Russian Interlude” wanly radiates from one of the walls. Time is once again put “out of joint” when a dialogue between Mayakovsky and Polonskaya, his last lover, is interrupted by a recorded snippet of a radio play (identified as 1995 Deutschland Radio pro-

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gram on Mayakovsky’s life and work), which closes the temporal gap between the 1930s and the post-Wende period. The voices, one male (M), one female (F), remain unidentified: F: Mayakovsky? M: Here. F: What remains? M: “Twenty Years’ Work.”

Referring to the retrospective exhibition of his work, Mayakovsky signals his exhaustion, the first sign of the depression that will culminate in his suicide. His despair that his best years are behind him resembles that of Lenin, who begged Stalin to deliver him strychnine when he realized that his first major stroke had debilitated his political future.26 Stalin brought the matter before the Politburo, but for naught: Lenin’s wish was denied, bearing witness to the revolutionary stance of instrumentalizing the individual in the interests of History. No longer useful to the proletarian struggle, Lenin and Mayakovsky found death the only option. In Mayakovsky’s peculiar worldview, Roman Jakobson maintains, it was not death but life that required motivation. Since his death is “easy,” it stands as the unmarked term in its binary opposition to life.27 Later in the drama, after Mayakovsky commits suicide, he returns to haunt Lili, Elsa, and Polonskaya. When he reiterates his mantra (“it was too late then”), Elsa lashes out at his lassitude. “What now?” she insists. What to do in this in-between time when both love and the revolutionary impulse of communism seem to have withered away? As he did when Elsa was a child, Mayakovsky urges her to find a literary channel for her political (and erotic) energies, much to her chagrin. Writing holds no interest for her if her love for Mayakovsky remains unrequited; she disparages his encouragement to write as merely a defense against her amorous designs. Mayakovsky, however, has a different take on the matter. With regard to Elsa he sees himself as “the other side of the things you see, the vines of the tomatoes you eat, the underside of the beds in which you make love, the foundation of the houses you won’t build, the cause of your actions. Because you didn’t get me.” Mayakovsky and Elsa communicate with the words and things that appear over his dead body, as it were. Here the poet passes on his writerly bent, bequeathing to Elsa his idioms and cadences.28 Elsa’s inherited signifiers are like relics, for they attest to that which remains hidden: where the corpse falls into the ground, the tombstone is erected and inscribed. The collapse of Elsa’s love propels her out of the deadlock of their never-to-be-consummated love and inverts itself to become the foundation for something new: her literary formation. Mayakovsky remains the unassimilable element after which she longs, in pursuit of which she

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can transgress the confines of melancholia, by writing. In his death he becomes the absent source and cause of her actions, the impossible target of desire. Surveying the shifting grounds of the post-Wende landscape, Elsa has begun to see the necessity—at once aesthetic and political—of contemplating and recording the linguistic changes wrought by economic transformation. For a moment, Kuckart puts Elsa in the same position as the feminine subject of Dürer’s Melencolia I. Head tilted, Melancholia’s posture connotes that she is actively occupied with thoughts rather than submitting to the oblivion of sleep. If Dürer captures a moment of absolute stillness, stopping time—the bell’s clapper hangs straight down, the scale has found its equilibrium, the hourglass has come to rest—Kuckart’s in-between time overlaps both the stillness of this engraved world and some other future.29 While biding her time, Elsa will monitor the German language: she must not only detect its mutations but also testify to what remains relatively immutable within it. Elsa resists Mayakovsky’s injunction, claiming that she “does not love him in order to write about it,” but in the same breath she also betrays her desire to transpose her love into metaphor. “I love you like one loves the early morning, like one loves Saturday afternoons or twilight in the countryside,” she muses. “I love you the way one loves something forever.” At the end of the play Kuckart allows us to grieve Mayakovsky’s suicide and at the same time invest with redemptive hope Elsa’s practice of writing, a practice taken up on the threshold of mourning and melancholia. This complex stance toward grief recalls Benjamin once again—not the Benjamin of “Left-Wing Melancholy,” but rather the one of The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928) and the “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940).30 These two works present a double take on indolence of the heart. True melancholy does indeed slacken and linger, but arrested by this delay, Benjamin suggests, it promises both occult and allegorical insight. In Kuckart’s drama, Elsa pauses in this depressed time, at once heavy-hearted and spiritually empowered. But, recognizing that she never has (or could) possess Mayakovsky, she sets herself the task of writing her desire and so moves beyond this reserve. Mayakovsky, on the other hand, is crushed by the weight of the present. Lacan recounts a fable that touches on the difference between Elsa’s and Mayakovsky’s ways of seeing. In the story of Zeuxis and Parrhasios the characters challenge one another to a painting game—Zeuxis lures a flock of birds with his rendering of grapes, but Parrhasios outdoes his opponent by painting a picture of a veil so lifelike that it tricks the human eye. “Well, and now show us what you have painted behind it,” Zeuxis is forced to ask.31 But there is nothing there. Nothing, for Lacan, beyond a triumph of the gaze over the eye. The picture Parrhasios crafts incites the viewer to ask

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what is behind it; it seduces Zeuxis into seeing the veil as a concealing frame or container, challenging him to apprehend that the curtain is the thing itself. The similarity to Müller’s waiting-room mentality is striking here; searching vainly for what lies beyond, one perceives the railway station not as a place of passage but rather one of stasis. Likewise, in Melancholie I Elsa plays the part of Zeuxis: watching the trouble in the East from a comfortable distance, she can maintain the fiction that an authentic revolution is raging behind the veil of atrocities. Meanwhile Mayakovsky sees what Müller does not: left too long in suspense, one can be driven to destruction. Mayakovsky concedes the derailment of socialism and faces the consequences of his collapsed universe: against the wall, his only choice is suicide. A messenger of progress, Mayakovsky was an antinostalgic who lived life to its extremes. Confronted with the terrifying reality that modernization itself was becoming “outdated” by Stalin’s programming, he put himself in a fatal predicament. Resisting any retreat into the past, Mayakovsky could only aim for the future. But to move forward meant to commit suicide. THE MELANCHOLIC FALL

Melancholia is something like lovesickness, Freud notes in “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman” (1920). Falling in love, the subject falls into the object; he allows himself to be drawn out of the bounds of his own subjectivity to the point where he succumbs to this enamoration. This malaise, when crossed with narcissism, waxes suicidal. It culminates in a passage à l’acte—often in the form of a self-destructive fall— which is the final, desperate attempt of the melancholic to unify himself with the lost object.32 Yet in order for him to extinguish the desire that festers in the gap between the subject and the object, he must at the same time negate his own self, the material support of that object. At the bottom of his subjective fall, the melancholic marries death, his one true love.33 Kuckart twice stages suicide as the outcome of melancholia in her drama. Mayakovsky’s suicide in scene 14, foreshadowed in the beginning of the play, would seem to be the culminating moment of the drama, but another character upstages this act in the final scene. This unnumbered scene, titled “Echo,” terminates the events of Melancholie I with a second suicide, one committed by a nameless, faceless East Berliner, a character whom Kuckart seems to present as a generic victim of postcommunist melancholy. Despite the wide differential separating this anonymous character from the singular figure of Mayakovsky, their lives converge in these acts of self-annihilation; this doubling, in turn, conjoins the two ends of state socialism that Kuckart dramatizies in Melancholie I. Indeed the very dramatic tension of the play suspends itself between these two deaths. If the question as to what pushed Mayakovsky to take his life is left open,

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the second suicide in Melancholie I posits a more resolute conclusion. In this scene an anonymous child tells his mother that he has been delayed on his way home by an incident in the public transportation system: a passenger threw himself onto the railway, stopping traffic. A number of other figures emerge and recount the mishap in various ways, each touching upon the motif “I’m coming late,” producing the effect of a sound collage about the way in which individual lives have been put on hold by the accidents of history. One speaker recounts her disgust and horror at having to walk over the remains strewn over the tracks, mentioning to her mother that she will not be able to eat meat for a while. Her close encounter with the corpse gives her pause to consider the depressive pall that has fallen over East Berlin. —We walked over dismembered parts. On the way to Track Three. —He wasn’t old at all. —Definitely unemployed. —Out of lovesickness? You think so? No, I don’t believe it. —Not here in the East. Suicide on the grounds of romantic disappointment would be unthinkable; unemployment and the sense of being a foreigner in one’s own country would be more likely to lead a young and able-bodied person to ruin. Yet if citizens of the former GDR suffer from this sense of being strangers to themselves, this nevertheless cannot be taken to mean that they were conquered by the West and left with nothing more than their past reveries. Rather, Easterners embody radical melancholia: they possess the object (their land, their freedom) but are disenfranchised of their dreams. What remains of the utopian imagination that sparked state socialism? The lesson of Beuys’s Economic Values is that fidelity to this legacy can easily degenerate into infatuation with an idealized past, morbid fascination with failure itself, or the knowing melancholia of disavowal. In order to avoid the traps of nostalgia but still defend the utopian impulse that fueled socialism, Kuckart writes a drama that attests to both the losses of socialist history and the dejection of the present. Melancholie I at once discloses the ennui of stunned resignation and the tendency to romanticize the revolutionary Other, but, more than that, it also stages the intrepid, suicidal assumption of failure. Part of the politics of collective memory, the problem of historical remains is hardly unique to postunification Germany; indeed, it already festered in France in the early 1870s, at the same time as Bismarck first unified Germany. The Communards set out to remove the Vendôme Column from the center of Paris and install it in a museum. But instead they toppled it, and the monument fell to pieces. With the dismantling of state socialism, we come full circle. Shards of the communist past file into the museum and onto the stage, where they flare up in memory, throbbing

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like phantom organs. Might not this uncanny persistence of the past work to resist the entrenchment of “the posthistorical”? Perhaps it harbors a latent utopian desire, a refusal to accept the fait accompli of late capitalism as the only imaginable frame of our world. NOTES

1. Judith Kuckart, Melancholie I, oder die zwei Schwestern, dir. Jörg Aufenanger, Berliner Ensemble, Berlin, December 18, 1996. Unless otherwise indicated, all German and French translations in this essay are mine. 2. One such minor detail that situates the drama in the aftermath of state socialism is a prop: a carrier bag marked with the name of a Berlin-area discounter, Rudi’s Reste Rampe, a name that recalls the old joke that the letters DDR stand for Der dumme Rest (the dumb remainder) and, for many, sustains negative stereotypes about Germans from the new states. 3. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 245. 4. Jacques Hassoun draws his concept of “the I-know-not-what” from Vladimir Jankélévitch and Benito Feijo’s work on “le je-ne-sais-quoi.” See Jacques Hassoun, La cruauté mélancholique (Paris: Aubier, 1995), 64; Vladimir Jankélévitch, Le je-nesais-quoi et le presque-rien (Paris: Le Seuil, 1980), 11; Benito Feijo, Le je-ne-sais-quoi, trans. Catherine Paoletti (Paris: Éditions de l’Éclat, 1989). 5. Jürgen Habermas, “The New Opacity: The Crisis of the Welfare State and the Exhaustion of Utopian Energies,” in The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians’ Debate, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989). 6. Andreas Huyssen formulates these questions in his recent investigation of cultural memory, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York: Routledge, 1995). 7. Not far from the Polish border, Eisenhüttenstadt is a city marked by the history of Central Europe. After the founding of the GDR, Eisenhüttenstadt was established as Stalinstadt, the “first German socialist city,” reassuming the name Eisenhüttenstadt, or literally Steelworks City, only in the 1950s, after Stalin’s death. 8. Guest books were a common sight in GDR museums, as were notebooks for recording comments and complaints for the managers of many institutions, such as schools, hospitals, and shops. Citizens were meant to understand that they played a decisive role in policy-making and that administrators would take seriously their public criticism. 9. Klaus Staeck, Joseph Beuys: Das Wirtschaftswertprinzip (Heidelberg: Edition Staeck, 1990), 7. 10. Although a few of the packages included in Economic Values were produced in the Federal Republic of Germany, it is packets from the GDR, Poland, and the Soviet Union that form the bulk of the goods amassed on the shelves and that make the greatest visual impact.

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11. Perhaps Beuys was aware of the ethnographic risk undertaken in Economic Values—he does after all attempt to signal his foreignness with regard to the state socialist world. Into the installation Beuys inserted a piece of his own sculpture, a blocklike plaster cast he had produced in the 1960s but then consigned to storage. Several steps were necessary to integrate the cast with the other elements. Beuys daubed the block’s chipped edges with butter in a deliberately futile attempt to repair them. (If anything, the butter would accelerate the sculpture’s decomposition, since its lipids would macerate the plaster.) He also marked each element of the assemblage with his own signature and the note “Economic Value 1,” thereby elevating each element of the work from found object into a ready-made and integrating it into a whole. But these interventions undermine themselves. Beuys’s inscriptions partly erase the different histories of the elements, obscuring or even conceptually obliterating the fact that the Soviet bloc objects were extracted from a functioning (if dysfunctional) economy, whereas his sculpture was resurrected from his own warehouse, an archival limbo that he himself had created. By eliding the “origins” of the disparate elements, Beuys suggests that both his plaster cast and the socialist material world have been disinterred from deep storage. 12. Ulrich Dietzel, “Gespräch mit Heiner Müller,” Sinn und Form 6 (1985): 27– 28. 13. Pierre Fédida concurs with this point and adds that the relic reminds the mourner of his power over the dead. It fends off anxieties of death and the “ne plus” (“no longer”) that awaits the mortal, keeping at bay any unsettling visions of the decaying corpse, which might haunt the mourner’s imagination, paradoxical as that might seem. Speaking of the mourner’s aversion to decay, Fédida writes: “On pourrait donc dire que la relique, qui, en elle-même est un reste dérisoire et répugnant, met le cadavre et sa putréfaction hors de toute représentation [One could say that the relic, which, in itself, is a lowly and repugnant bit of debris, puts beyond representation the corpse and all its waste].” See Pierre Fédida, “La relique et le travail du deuil,” Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse 2 (fall 1970): 249, 252. 14. Hassoun’s characterization of the melancholic accords with my point. Drawing a distinction between two types—the melancholic and the assassin—he writes: “Si l’assassin est celui qui, coupable, tue pour faire reconnaître sa culpabilité (et pour éventuellement en un temps second éprouver du remords), le mélancolique est celui qui, dévoré d’un remords et d’une nostalgie pathétique. . . , va s’évertuer à détruire et à se détruire [If the assassin is the one who kills to make his guilt recognizable (and, as a result, to elicit a sense of remorse), the melancholic is the one who, devoured by pathetic remorse and nostalgia . . . , will strive (s’évertuer) to destroy others and himself as well].” Jacques Hassoun, La cruauté mélancholique (Paris: Aubier, 1995), 76. 15. Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy (London: Nelson Press, 1964). 16. Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Ronald Martinez (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 18. 17. See Walter Benjamin, “Linke Melancholie,” Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972), 279–83. 18. In her definition of melancholia Brigitte Balbure draws a useful distinction

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between lack and loss. See Brigitte Balbure, “La mélancolie,” Le discours psychanalytique 1 (February 1989): 135–62. 19. Agamben, Stanzas, 20. 20. Here I refer to the Lacanian “objet petit a,” which is not simply the lost object but rather one that comes into being only through its loss, that is to say, an object that merely gives body to loss. See Jacques Lacan, “The Line and Light” and “The Subject and the Other: Alienation,” in The Four Fundamental Concepts of PsychoAnalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 103–4, 203–4. 21. Helmut Dubiel, “Linke Trauerarbeit,” Merkur 496 ( June 1990): 482–91. 22. These lines from Melancholie I seem to evoke Kant’s claim that, although the French Revolution inflamed the wild mob’s basest passions and catalyzed destruction, as a social event it did nonetheless confer the sublime feeling that freedom was effectively possible for Europe’s enlightened public. See Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of Faculties (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 153. 23. Staeck, Joseph Beuys, 7; Dietzel, “Gespräch mit Heiner Müller,” 27. 24. Heiner Müller and Jan Hoet, “Insights into the Process of Production—A Conversation,” in Documenta IX, ed. Jan Hoet (Stuttgart: Edition Cantz, 1992), 96. 25. Remarking that “everything” remained in the spell of “a constant state of anticipation,” Müller compares the GDR to a railway waiting room, a situation that can be viewed positively and negatively at once: “There would be an announcement: ‘The train will arrive at 18.15 and depart at 18.20’—and it never did arrive at 18.15. Then came the next announcement: ‘The train will arrive at 20.10.’ And so on. You went on sitting there in the waiting room, thinking, ‘It’s bound to come at 21.05.’ That was the situation. Basically, a state of Messianic anticipation. There are constant announcements of the Messiah’s impending arrival, and you know perfectly well that he won’t be coming. And yet somehow, it’s good to hear him announced all over again” (Müller and Hoet, “Insights into the Process of Production,” 96–97). 26. See Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy (London: Pimlico, 1997), 793. 27. In a conversation with Krystyna Pomorska, Roman Jakobson recalls that it was in a letter he wrote to Trubetzkoi about Mayakovsky’s life and work (dated 1930) that he began to articulate the notion of “markedness,” one of the keystones of his conception of linguistic structure. (For this reference I am indebted to Yve-Alain Bois, Harvard University.) See Roman Jakobson, “On a Generation That Squandered Its Poets,” in Twentieth Century Russian Literary Criticism, ed. Viktor Erlich (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975); and Roman Jakobson, “The Concept of Mark,” in On Language/Roman Jakobson, ed. Linda Waugh and Monique Monville-Burston (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 135–36. 28. Following Pierre Fédida, we could see Elsa’s inherited signifiers as relics, for they attest to “the visibility of the hidden” (la visibilité du caché). Reflecting upon the meaning of burial within mourning, he, like Kuckart, summons forth the notion of “the other side of things” (une représentation visuelle de l’envers des choses) —to describe the underworld that the relic represents. Fédida defines the relic as follows: “Fragment matériel extrait d’un corps disparu, la relique donne droit à une visibilité du caché. . . . Ainsi qu’en témoignent les enfants dans les questions qu’ils posent relativement à la disparition du mort, l’inhumation définit le sens du caché au niveau de la recherche d’une représentation visuelle de l’envers des choses et de leur conformation souterraine [A material fragment extracted from a body no longer

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present, the relic enables one to see what is hidden. . . . As is the case when children ask questions about the disappearance of the deceased, burial defines ‘the hidden’ at the level of a search for a visual representation of the undersides of things as well as the search for their subterranean forms].” Fédida, “La relique,” 251. 29. Maxime Préaud also reads Dürer’s Melencolia I as a study of stillness. She writes: “Le temps est arrêté; ou plutôt on ne peut plus le mesurer, parce qu’on sait bien qu’objectivement il passe, mais dans l’image et subjectivement tout est immobile et silencieux [Time has stopped; or, rather, one can no longer measure it, because one objectively knows that it passes, but both in the image and subjectively everything is motionless and quiet].” See Maxime Préaud, Mélancolies (Paris: Herscher, 1982), 6. 30. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1985); Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968). 31. Lacan, “The Line and Light,” 103. 32. Sigmund Freud, “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 18, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1955), 145–72. 33. Brigitte Balbure writes: “Son suicide correspond d’une certaine façon à l’aboutissement logique de sa condition désirante. L’amour du moi exauce sa perte, le sujet manque à manquer, sans que l’angoisse n’intervienne durablement, et se vide peu à peu. Lorsqu’il n’est plus qu’une enveloppe vide, la lueur de désir qui l’éclaire encore lui donne juste l’énergie d’enjamber le parapet ou l’appui de la fenêtre pour enfin accomplir ce qui doît l’être, achever son parcours, et rencontrer sa seule épouse: la mort [In a certain sense his suicide corresponds to the logical outcome of his desiring condition. The love of the ego is granted its loss, the subject lacks to lack, without any lasting intervention of anxiety, and gradually empties out. As he is nothing more than an empty envelope, the slightest glimmer of desire that flickers within him gives him just enough energy to scale a parapet or mount a windowsill to accomplish finally that which should be done, that is, to finish his journey and meet his only lover: death].” Balbure, “La mélancolie,” 158.

iii

Ideal Remains

Kaja Silverman

All Things Shining One man looks at a dying bird and thinks there’s nothing but unanswered pain. And death’s got the final word. It’s laughing at him. Another man sees that same bird and feels the glory. Feels somethin’ smilin’ through it. sergeant walsh, The Thin Red Line

In the publicity statement with which it released The Thin Red Line (1998), Fox 2000 Pictures presents Terrence Malick’s third film as the story of the victory of the American Army Rifle Company, C-for-Charlie, over the Japanese during the Battle of Guadalcanal.1 The Thin Red Line, we are told, “follows the journey [of the men], from the surprise of an unopposed landing, through the bloody and exhausting battles that follow, to the ultimate departure of those who survived.”2 As if in anticipation of the popular reviews that would later excoriate Malick for his lack of interest in this war story,3 the Fox publicists immediately go on to say that The Thin Red Line tells “more than a tale of men fighting a key battle.” It also “explores the intense bonds that develop between men under terrible stress, even evil.”4 Oddly, however, at a crucial point in the Fox 2000 publicity statement, its authors abruptly shift their attention from Malick’s film to the life of James Jones, the author of the novel upon which the film is ostensibly based. They write: To Jones, who served with an Army unit in Quadalcanal, the soldiers’ feelings and emotions developed into nothing less than a sense of love . . . of family. The horrors of war helped them lose their idea of self and of the war around them. They were no longer fighting solely for patriotic reasons or the large world and its issues which had brought them there; they were fighting for survival and for the men next to them.5

We need not think long about why Jones is suddenly made to stand in for Malick’s film in this way. The Fox 2000 publicists were clearly in search of a marketable formula. Egregiously present in Jones’s account of his war experiences, this formula is nowhere to be found in Malick’s film.6 Not only does The Thin Red Line not represent the Charlie Company as a family, 323

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but it also critiques the easy recourse of one commanding officer after another to the discourse of fatherhood. The last time in the film that an officer uses the language of patriarchy to naturalize his relationship to the soldiers serving under him, Sergeant Walsh (Sean Penn) responds in voiceover: “Everything a lie—everything you hear, everything you see . . . they just keep coming, one after another. . . . They want you dead or in their lie.” But it is not merely at the moment that the Fox publicists shift their attention from The Thin Red Line to James Jones that they seem to be talking about something else. Nothing in their account helps us prepare ourselves for the singular affectivity of this film. By affectivity, I mean both a darkness verging on total eclipse and a radiance brighter than the sun’s return. To be present at a screening of Malick’s third film is to be permeated to one’s psychic core by an almost unbearable negativity. It is to live it, breathe it, drink it. At the same time, however, to watch The Thin Red Line is to participate in the search for a clearing in this black forest of the soul, for a space opening onto illumination, affirmation, and joy. Although at the beginning of the film these clearings seem to be many, by the middle there no longer seems anything but a dense thicket of trees. It is then that we learn the crucial lesson that the film has to teach us: the only way to reach the light is to plunge yet deeper into the forest. If I have not been able to characterize the state of mind into which The Thin Red Line throws us without invoking Heideggerian metaphors, it is no accident. In his third film, as in his two previous films, Malick’s concerns are philosophical rather than conventionally narratological, and philosophy here manifestly means “phenomenology.” But The Thin Red Line is more than a philosophically oriented film. It does philosophy, every bit as much as a text like Heidegger’s On the Way to Language might be said to do.7 Like the Heidegger of this disclosive text, moreover, Malick is not content merely to speak about Being; he also shows it to us.8 THE NOTHING

In “What Is Metaphysics?” Heidegger advances a series of interlocking propositions about human beingness, or what he calls Dasein. To be a human being, he tells us, is to be “held out” into the “nothing”—into the void of that nonbeing out of which we have emerged and to which we will return.9 No external agent performs this action; there is only us and the nothing. Consequently, there is no support onto which we ourselves could grab hold, nothing to protect us from falling into darkness. We typically respond with fear when the nothing looms before us, and spend our lives attempting to avoid it. However, it is only by making the void our own that we can realize our “most proper possibility” and relate to other beings in a way that per-

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mits them to do the same. The darkness of nonbeing brings us to others and ourselves by revealing what animates both: Being itself.10 Nothingness is the site for the disclosure of Being, because Being is not an entity but rather a very particular relation between ourselves and other creatures and things. In “What Is Metaphysics?” Heidegger names this relation “wonder.” We wonder about our world when the question of why it should exist becomes urgent for us and when we become capable of dwelling within the space of mystery that question creates. So long as we are able to remain engrossed in the things of our world, we either do not pose this question at all, or reach immediately for reassuring answers. Since we have, as Heidegger puts it, lots of “idols,” it is not difficult for us to find such answers. We ask the question, Why are there beings at all? and dwell in the space of mystery that question creates only when we add the crucial words: “and why not rather nothing?”11 It is not through our reason but rather through our states of mind that we apprehend or fail to apprehend our mortality. This is because, as Heidegger puts it in Being and Time, “the possibilities of disclosure which belong to cognition reach far too short a way compared with the primordial disclosure belonging to moods, in which Dasein is brought before its Being as ‘there.’ ”12 It is also affectively, rather than rationally, that we assume or fail to assume our finitude—by way of a mood rather than abstract knowledge that the turning away from or the turning toward the nothing “is what it is.”13 The refusal to apprehend the limits that define us can take a variety of forms, all of which have in common what might be called the gestures of “negation” or “nihilat[ion].”14 When, on the other hand, we succeed in apprehending our mortality, it is primarily through two states of mind: fear and anxiety. Fear is the affect through which we apprehend the “nothing” in the mode of a turning away. Anxiety is the affect through which we apprehend it in the mode of a turning toward.15 Fear fails to reconcile us to the nothing, because it always represents the attempt to specify or concretize the nothing. Anxiety, on the other hand, “attunes” us to it,16 because it is the affect par excellence of the indeterminate. Although Heidegger might be said to be the greatest philosopher of mortality, he remained throughout his life unwilling to speak publicly about the death camps. It could be plausibly argued that he could not do so, not only because of his own Nazi past, but also because the death to which Hitler subjected his victims had none of the individuating possibilities about which Heidegger writes in Being and Time. By condemning the Jews to extinction, and by staging their annihilation as a mass event, the Nazis prevented them from achieving a redemptive Being-toward-death. Since warfare also involves an unwarranted intrusion into human mortality and also throws masses of human beings into the maw of death, it might

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seem to pose almost as great a challenge to Heideggerian thought as Auschwitz does.17 Being-toward-death, however, should not be confused with the termination of existence; it is more a way of inhabiting the world than of leaving it. In both Being and Time and “What Is Metaphysics?” Heidegger also intimates that the sooner we arrive at this state, the better it is for the people and things that surround us. Wonder ends violence. That this lesson should derive from someone who was once a fervent defender of National Socialism only proves the truth of the maxim that it is possible to give what one does not oneself possess.18 In The Thin Red Line, Malick takes phenomenology to a place where Heidegger himself was not capable of bringing it: the battlefield. He also suggests that there is no place where a text like “What Is Metaphysics?” is more needed. This is of course in part because the “nothing” hits a frontline soldier in the face with every step he takes. More crucially, though, it is because it is almost impossible for those engaged in mortal combat to disintricate their mortality from the corpses strewn around them, and so to experience it outside the coordinates of loss. THROWNESS INTO DEATH

The battle dramatized by The Thin Red Line has none of the moral or political clarity that we are accustomed to impute to World War II. It is impossible to establish a clear division between the aggressors and the aggressed. Malick shows the victory of Charlie Company to be driven by the most venal of motives. Lieutenant Colonel Tall (Nick Nolte), who presides over the Battle of Guadalcanal, knowingly confines his men to a “tomb” from which they cannot “lift the lid” when he orders them to proceed directly up the hill to the Japanese bunker at the top. He also forces the depleted Charlie Company to continue fighting after the bunker has been taken, even though he knows that many will die from lack of water, because to have another company finish off the Japanese on Guadalcanal would be “more than [he] could stand.” As he tells a subordinate who persists in demanding water for the dehydrated men, “I’ve worked, slaved, eaten, done buckets of shit for this . . . you don’t know what it feels like to be passed over. . . . this is my first war!” Shortly thereafter we see the men under his command beating and jeering at the Japanese soldiers they have captured, in another demonstration of American indifference to human life. At the same time, the Battle of Guadalcanal is, at least from the Allied side, a necessary and “just” battle. The Japanese aggressors have built an airfield on Guadalcanal, which gives them an enormous military advantage over the Allies. If Charlie Company can succeed in wresting it away from

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them, it will not only weaken the Japanese but also strengthen the Allies. The airfield will give the Allies air power for one thousand miles in every direction, possibly making them the victor in the larger war with Japan. And the war on the Pacific front is inexorably linked to another war, the war against the Germans, in which justice would once again seem to be on the Allied side. If Charlie Company does not win the Battle at Guadalcanal, there will be much more suffering and bloodshed than that inflicted by the Japanese gunners at the top of the hill. Malick also makes clear that the venal lieutenant colonel is the architect of the American victory. The only force strong enough to push the Charlie Company up the blood-stained hill, he helps us to understand, is a boundless egoism. However, Malick’s concern is finally not with morality, but rather with mortality, something that he shows to be prior to all judgments of good and evil, or right or wrong. We are all, as Heidegger tells us, “thrown” into finitude.19 We are headed from the first breath we take toward a death that is both “certain” and “indefinite,” and neither the limits of our being nor the limits of our knowledge can be “outstripped.”20 However, it is very different to choose the destiny we cannot escape by becoming in advance the individual that event will make us, as Heidegger urges us to do, and to be cast by an external force into the mouth of a death machine. Malick makes us see this difference in The Thin Red Line. He shows us the clammy faces of the soldiers in the boats speeding toward the island of Guadalcanal; their frantic and spasmodic movements as they descend from the ship to the patrol boats and run from the patrol boats onto the beach; and their blind ascent of the hill, at the top of which Japanese gunners await them, protected by the concrete shell of a bunker. He also makes us hear the protest of a soldier in the middle of the night against the intolerable realization that he is one of those who has survived the first day’s fighting, and must therefore confront at least one more time a foe whom he knows is there, but cannot see. Rather than face this intolerable combination of certainty and indefiniteness, he attempts to provoke his enemy to kill him immediately. Finally, Malick exposes us to the terrifying sense of loss that afflicts those who are constantly living among the dying and dead. At the same time, the director of The Thin Red Line unwaveringly persists in demonstrating the complexity of mortality, even when it bears down upon his characters in the shape of an enemy cannon. No more for the soldiers in the Charlie Company than for the Christian meditating on a skull is death to be located at the intersection of flesh and bayonet. In war as in peacetime, it is through one’s affective orientation to death and not through a bodily collapse that one meets it or fails to meet it. The Thin Red Line opens with a montage of images of nature at odds with itself: a crocodile in water, presumably in search of prey, trees being en-

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gulfed by parasitic plants. This montage passes imperceptibly into another, now one showing idealized images of life among the Melanesians of the Solomon Islands.21 Two American men are living among these people. As we learn shortly afterward, they are AWOL soldiers from Charlie Company. That Malick’s concern in this film is death in general and not war in particular becomes almost immediately evident when Wit ( Jim Caviezel), one of the soldiers, begins to speak in voice-over about his mother’s demise: “I remember my mother when she was dying. She was all shrunk up and gray. I asked her if she was afraid. She just shook her head. I was afraid to touch the death I seen in her. Couldn’t find nothin’ beautiful or upliftin’ about her goin’ back to God. I’ve heard people talking about immortality—but I ain’t seen it.” This speech, which begins with a shot of a Melanesian mother holding her child in the ocean, is anchored through two reverse shots to Wit’s point of view. Wit speaks the last sentence as the camera focuses on him. In spite of this sudden corporealization of Wit’s speech, he still seems to be talking to himself. Malick’s recourse to synchronization at this moment thus has an effect analogous to the sudden zoom in on a look in a Fassbinder film: it seems to take us deeper inside the one who sees. However, The Thin Red Line then cuts to a montage of what is presumably Wit’s mother during the last days of her illness, silent except for Hans Zimmer’s evocative musical score. This montage is suffused with a golden light, contrasting strongly with Wit’s own account of his mother’s death, and in it the mother strokes her son’s hand lovingly and provides the welcome support against which her younger daughter leans. Further resisting any attempt that might be made to assimilate the last part of Wit’s interior monologue to his memory is the shot with which it ends. The camera pans away from the frame of the mother’s bed and tilts upward, revealing not the ceiling of the room but rather the unobstructed blue of the sky beyond. In a dissolve, this blue sky becomes part of the sea, land, and oceanscape of the Solomon Islands. “Openness to the world” is the dominant trope invoked by these last images. Over another montage of this sun-soaked environment, within which water again plays a central role, Wit now meditates in voice-over upon his own death: “I wondered how it would be when I died—what it’d be like to know that this breath now was the last one you was ever gonna draw. I just hope I can meet it in the same way she did—with the same calm. ’Cause that’s where it’s hidden—the immortality I hadn’t seen.” We now realize with a start that what the montage in the mother’s bedroom has shown us is not at all what Wit saw as he attended to his dying mother. It is, instead, what she herself felt as she approached death. Malick has in effect filmed her affect, shown us her calm. With this meditation on death, Wit begins his own journey toward a similar tranquillity.

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NO WORLD BUT THIS ONE

At the end of the last Solomon Island sequences, an American patrol boat approaches the refuge where Wit and his comrade are hiding. One scene later, Malick shows us Wit talking to his superior officer, Sergeant Walsh, aboard a ship on its way to Guadalcanal. In this scene, Walsh tells Wit emphatically: “In this world a man himself is nothing—and there ain’t no world but this one.” This is a message to which Walsh will return again and again. Not only is there nothing beyond the world we inhabit, he will repeatedly say; we ourselves are this “nothing.” Given that Wit represents the spiritual center of The Thin Red Line and that he generally argues with his commanding officer on the occasions when the latter gives voice to his dark vision, there might seem to be no reason to view Walsh as Malick’s spokesman on this matter. However, the scenes involving Walsh are not the only ones in The Thin Red Line to call into question the notion that there is any reality beyond the mundane. Although not couching their invocations in conventionally Christian terms, both Captain Staros (Elias Koteas) and Private Bell (Ben Chaplin) appeal to an extraterrestrial principle and in both cases are shown to be calling into the void. On the night before the first part of the Battle of Guadalcanal, Staros prays to an unidentified power while looking at the flame of a candle. “Let me not betray you. Let me not betray my men,” he says. A night later he utters a similar but even vaguer appeal in voice-over while the camera focuses on a luminous moon: “You’re my light—my guide.” On the intervening day, Malick shows Staros adhering to a strict Judeo-Christian code of ethics in his relation to his men, refusing to obey his superior’s command to send his remaining soldiers forward into a battle situation that will mean death for many of them. His “light” or “guide” thus seems to be a transcendent (albeit generalized) principle of virtue. Later, though, he appears to abandon all belief in a law higher than the one operative on the battlefield. He tells Lieutenant Colonel Tall that Tall is “right about everything [he] said,” and Staros only looks pensively in Tall’s direction when the latter responds: “It’s not necessary for you to ever tell me that you think I’m right—ever! We’ll assume it.” Surprisingly, the events of the film also locate greater authority on the side of the lieutenant colonel than on that of the much more morally upright captain. The other soldiers obey Tall’s commands and win the Battle of Guadalcanal. The weaning of Private Bell away from his belief in a world beyond this one is a much more protracted and painful affair and one whose affective permutations Malick makes fully available to us. During the boat trip to Guadalcanal, another soldier asks Bell why, having previously been an officer, he is now an enlisted man. Bell answers that during his previous stint

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in the military he missed his wife so much that—after four months—he resigned his commission. Through one extraordinary flashback and/or voice-over sequence after another, which always repeat the primary colors either of the Solomon Island sequences or the mother montage, Malick shows us Bell’s love for his wife. The first of Bell’s flashbacks occurs at the end of his conversation with the other soldier, in response to the query, “Where is [your wife] now?” It consists of three shots, in each of which blue predominates: a shot of Bell’s wife alone on the green lawn of the air base, and then two shots of Bell and his wife together at dusk on a beach. In the last of these shots, Bell’s wife strokes his back through his Hawaiian shirt. As the camera focuses upon the fabric of this shirt, which not only reiterates the blue of the ocean and the darkening sky, but also evokes Wit’s beloved Melanesian culture, Bell asks: “Why should I be afraid to die? I belong to you.” Bell continues speaking over images of terrified soldiers feverishly preparing to leave the ship: “If I go first, I’ll wait for you there, on the other side of the dark waters. Be with me now.” Dark waters is the trope through which Bell will consistently image death. Here, however, mortality seems to Bell little than a minor inconvenience, something that he must pass over on his way back to his wife. He does not fear death, because it does not yet exist for him. The second of Bell’s flashbacks occurs as he makes his way alone to the top of a hill on which so many soldiers have already died on a reconnaissance mission. At first Malick shows us only sunlit images of the lovemaking of Bell and his wife. It is as if the private were trying to cancel all thought, to fill himself up with the wordless memories of his previous happiness. However, a funeral bell tolls ominously at regular intervals on Zimmer’s score. Then we see Bell’s wife standing in the ocean, wearing a yellow dress. Bell moves slowly toward her. “Come out,” she says reassuringly, “Come out to where I am.” The dark waters are now beginning to beckon, but in the form of what is already known and loved. In the place of the “nothing,” Bell has installed his beloved wife. The third of Bell’s flashbacks represents the most extreme of his attempts to reconstitute the void in the image of his happiness. Once again over images of his bedroom and his and his wife’s lovemaking, he says: “We . . . we together . . . one being . . . flow together like water, till I can’t tell you from me.” In their nondifferentiation from each other, Bell suggests, he and his wife have already achieved a liquid state; indeed, it is they who give meaning to the concept of liquidity. The two of them consequently have nothing to fear from the approach of the dark waters. At the climax of this dream of unending love, Malick does something extraordinary: he interpolates into the montage of Bell and his wife a shot of the hill on which the Charlie Company has been bleeding to death all

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day. We then hear the sound of waves, and the ocean reasserts its separateness from the lovers. Bell redoubles his attempt to contain the “nothing” that threatens him. He reconstitutes the sea first in the reassuring form of the bathwater in which he washes his wife, and then in the glass of water that his wife might be said to represent. “I drink you,” he says to his wife, “now.” But only in the last seconds of this flashback do the ominous sounds of the waves die away. Malick positions the last of Bell’s flashbacks near the end of the film, after a number of battle scenes and sequences of mind-numbing cruelty and suffering. Initially we see him walking among the palm trees on the Solomon Islands where the Charlie Company is spending a recreational week. In voice-over he says, as if writing a letter: “My dear wife, you get something twisted out of your insides by this blood, filth, and noise.” Bell’s interior monologue continues as he looks out at the Pacific Ocean: “I want to stay changeless for you,” he exclaims, again as if he were speaking to his wife. But the images that follow emphasize the separation of husband and wife. We see first Bell’s wife lying alone on their marital bed, in a semifetal position; then the remote and lonely vantage point from which Bell himself gazes at the Pacific Ocean; and finally Bell’s wife staring at the same ocean from the American side. What Bell says as we look at his wife’s recumbent form—“I want to come back to you the man I was” (my emphasis)—also attests to the impossibility of his wish to remain changeless for her; that man, he acknowledges, is already a thing of the past. A moment later, Bell effectively acknowledges the untraversability of the dark waters he earlier imagined passing effortlessly over. As we watch first husband and then wife gazing out at the immensity of the sea that divides them, Bell asks, poignantly: “How do we get to those other shores—to those blue hills?” Although he speaks for the first time in the form of a question, the question is rhetorical. It contains the implicit declarative: “We do not get to those other shores.” These two shots of husband and wife looking at the Pacific Ocean are followed by one of waves crashing against rocks. For the first time in the film, we are given an image of water that overtly constitutes an image of death. TOO LATE

Malick also makes clear again and again in The Thin Red Line that more is at issue in a man’s confrontation with the nonbeing that grounds him than the dissipation of his illusions. In the first scene aboard the ship carrying Charlie Company to Guadalcanal, Lieutenant Colonel Tall meditates in voice-over upon what it costs to keep the darkness at bay. Rather than being open to a potentially transformative future, he relates to his own life ac-

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cording to the temporal logic of the “already over” and the thematic logic of “waste.” Tall once had gifts to give, we learn, but they were never bestowed. As later becomes clear, during Charlie Company’s tortuous ascent of the hill to the well-protected enemy, Tall is not the only one to pay the price for his disavowal of his own mortality. His will-to-mastery in the face of death means mass destruction for his own soldiers as well as the enemy. Ironically, Tall already knows before the Battle of Guadalcanal even begins that, whatever its outcome, his own internal war will be an impossible one to win. Far from neutralizing his fear of death, the exorbitant demands that he is about to make on his men are only likely to increase it. “Worked my ass off,” he muses bitterly, “degraded myself—for them, my family, my home . . . all they sacrificed for me—poured out like water on the ground. All I might have given for love’s sake. Too late. Dyin’ slow as a tree. The closer you are to Caesar, the greater the fear.” But the most chilling dramatization of what it means for a human being to refuse to confront the “nothing” at the heart of his or her own being occurs in a series of scenes after the storming of the Japanese bunker. In the first of these scenes, an American soldier pulls two Japanese soldiers out of their hiding place at the top of the hill and shouts obscenities at them. He beats and kicks both of them and shoots one to death. As the American soldier makes evident both to the Japanese soldiers and to us, he sees them as a radically different species from himself. In an adjacent scene, members of Charlie Company gather their Japanese prisoners in a hut. One of the American soldiers spits at a Japanese soldier and puts two cigarettes in his nostrils to block out the smell of his dead companions. The smell of mortality, he thereby proclaims, is an alien and unwelcome odor. After a great deal of additional fighting, the American soldiers once again herd their prisoners together. The soldier who earlier put cigarettes up his nostrils crouches down beside a dying Japanese soldier, taunting him with his imminent death. He does not hesitate to express to the other the thought that would be unthinkable to himself: “Where you’re going, you’re not coming back from.” When the Japanese man stands, looking at the vultures gathering in the sky above him, the American again inserts cigarettes in his nostrils and plays with the medals he has collected off the enemy dead. When the dying man returns to the ground, the American soldier turns away from him, once again locating his own mortality elsewhere. He says in voice-over, as if to himself: “What are you to me? Nothin’.” Then, seeing that there is another dead man lying beside that soldier, he grabs hold of the other’s uniform, presumably in search of more medals. In these three scenes, it is the enemy who is stripped of all possible value and reduced to “a piece of shit.” Since this enemy is responsible for the loss of countless American lives, his devaluation might seem only an un-

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derstandable and unavoidable revenge. Malick, however, thinks otherwise. He distinguishes the process of affectively negating another being from the process of defeating that same being in battle by showing Wit later giving water to a Japanese captive. Malick also reminds us that once we succumb to indifference in relation to one part of the world, it is only a matter of time before it will invade even our most intimate relations. In a scene late in The Thin Red Line, Walsh and another American soldier sit together in a tent, talking about their respective states of mind. Gesturing toward a dying comrade lying on an adjacent cot, the other soldier says: “I look at that boy dyin’, I don’t feel nothin’. I don’t care about nothin’ anymore.” Malick refuses to characterize this affective indifference as the inevitable outcome of the brutalizing experiences undergone by Charlie Company. Walsh, who has inhabited the eye of the Guadalcanal storm, responds: “I don’t have that feeling yet—that numbness. Not like the rest of you guys.” Malick makes clear as well why Walsh is still able to manifest conspicuous concern for someone like Wit, and why he stands apart from the desecration to which some of his men subject the Japanese. In opposition to the soldier for whom death is a foreign smell, to be blocked out by putting cigarettes in his nostrils, Walsh is used to looking his mortality in the face. At the very beginning of this scene, he says in voice-over: “No matter how much training you got, how careful you are, it’s a matter of luck whether or not you get killed. Makes no difference who you are, or how tough a guy you might be. You’re in the wrong spot at the wrong time, you’re gonna get it.” ANSWERED PAIN

Because of his unflinching confrontation of the void of nonbeing, Walsh might seem to be the one character in The Thin Red Line to assume resolutely his Being-toward-death. However, in spite of the fact that he is the film’s primary spokesman for the “nothing,” and that he still manifestly cares about his men, Walsh is blind to what he himself calls the “glory” shining through death. For him, nothing emerges out of the “nothing”; rather, ashes are ashes, and dust is dust. Death signifies nothing more than the end of life. “We’re living in a world that is blowing itself to hell as fast as everyone can arrange it,” he tells Wit in the second of the ship scenes. “In a situation like that all a man can do is shut his eyes and let nothin’ touch him.” Later, on the Guadalcanal battlefront, he continues, “This army’s gonna kill you. If you’re smart, you’ll take care of yourself. There’s nothing you can do for anybody else. . . . If you die, it’s gonna be for nothing.” Even at the end of the film, when Walsh gives voice to the belief that there is after all one alternative to a life of absolute negation, and that is

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to find something that is one’s own and make an island out of it, he cannot even fantasize ever having such a thing. He can only imagine mourning for what he will never have. “If I never meet you in this life,” he says in voiceover as he and his new platoon march past a military cemetery, “let me feel the lack. A glance from your eyes and my life will be yours.” The affect that predominates in every scene in which Walsh appears is an unmitigated melancholy. For Wit, Staros, and Bell, on the other hand, the “nothing” is finally productive of something crucial. As we have seen, Wit speaks dismissively of the fantasy through which Christianity eviscerates mortality in his meditation on his mother’s death: “Couldn’t find nothin’ beautiful or upliftin’ about [my mother] goin’ back to God. I’ve heard people talking about immortality—but I ain’t seen it.” However, a moment later, he shares with us his conviction that there is another kind of immortality, one hidden within a particular human affect. “I just hope I can meet [death] in the same way she did—with the same calm,” he muses, “ ’Cause that’s where it’s hidden—the immortality I hadn’t seen.” Wit also realizes this wish. As he waits for his death near the end of the film, standing in a forest clearing surrounded by a circle of Japanese soldiers all pointing their guns at him, he manifests no fear. Indeed, he in no way resembles a man condemned to death. He seems fully engrossed in the landscape around him, indicating once again that mortality is more a way of living than of dying. Malick emphasizes this not only by showing him look past the Japanese soldiers to the forest beyond, but also by cutting from the gunshot that kills him to what he sees—sunlight streaming through the green leaves of the forest. Staros’s realization that there is no higher law to which he can appeal is also affectively enabling rather than disabling. It leads him not to care less about his men, but rather to care more. Immediately before he leaves Charlie Company to return to America, Staros engages in an imaginary dialogue with those who have served under his command. “You’ve been like my sons,” he begins. He then corrects himself, substituting the present tense for the past, and declaration for analogy: “You are my sons. My dear sons. You’ll live inside me now. I’ll carry you wherever I go.” With these words, Staros reconceives the filial metaphor through which one commanding officer after another has justified the unjustifiable. Abandoning fatherhood for something closer to motherhood, he becomes his men’s refuge, the site of their posthumous existence. Once again, it seems that surrendering faith in a transcendent reality need not imply a corresponding abandonment of belief in life after death. Even more extraordinary is the libidinal intensification to which Bell’s immersion in the dark waters leads. His last flashback does not end with the image of waves crashing against dangerous rocks. Rather, even as we

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are still looking at this image Bell exultantly utters the word love. The ocean shot then gives way to a series of gravity-defying shots of Bell’s wife in her yellow dress, swinging in slow-motion. The last of these shots hovers as an after-image over the shot of a blue sky, which yields to images of carnage and destruction and, finally, to the beam of a flashlight playing across the mosquito nets under which some of the members of Charlie Company are sleeping. “Where does [love] come from?” asks Bell over these images. “Who lit this flame in us? No war can put it out, conquer it. I was a prisoner—you set me free.” Once again The Thin Red Line refuses to make the end of metaphysics the occasion for the disenchantment of the world. Bell’s love for his wife is no more divested of its powers by his confrontation with the dark waters than the soldiers of Charlie Company are denied a life beyond death by their captain’s realization that the moon to which he lifts his eyes is just that—a solar body. Rather, restored to its rightful domain, this passion becomes what it should have been all along: the means by which Bell can transcend not his earthly abode but rather his own psychic limits. Since one of those limits has been the belief that he knows what love is, it is perhaps not surprising that he should begin with the last words he speaks in the film to ask where it comes from and to marvel at its inextinguishability. Although Bell’s wife subsequently writes him a letter asking for a divorce, Malick lets these words stand. ONE BIG SOUL

The first words we hear in The Thin Red Line also assume an interrogative form. “What’s this war at the heart of nature? Why does nature vie with itself—the land contend with the sea? Is there an avenging power in nature?” Wit asks in the opening minutes of the film. As he speaks, Malick shows us images of plants wrapping themselves destructively around other plants. These images seem to corroborate Wit’s view of a nature at war with itself. But any expectation that The Thin Red Line will be able to make sense for us of the violence at the heart of the plant and animal world is quickly put to rest. As scene after scene makes evident, Wit’s evocation of a nature red in touch and claw represents not Malick’s view of our earthly habitus, but rather the return of a human repressed. Whereas Staros attempts to escape from the brutality of war through religion, and Bell through love, Wit takes refuge in an ethnographic fantasy. As I mentioned earlier, the depiction of Melanesian life with which The Thin Red Line begins is intensely idealized: when Wit looks at the culture of the Solomon Islands, he interposes between it and himself an image of the harmony and contentment for which he longs. He sees not it, but rather the face of his own

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desire. So long as Wit inhabits this fantasy, there is no place where violence can surface except nature. Although it might appear upon a first screening of The Thin Red Line as if Malick himself shares Wit’s ethnographic fantasy, closer inspection reveals otherwise. All of the images of Melanesian culture are mediated through Wit’s subjectivity. Wit himself, moreover, acknowledges in the first of the scenes aboard the military ship that he has perhaps only “imagined” this other society, and much later in the film Malick makes clear that this was indeed the case. He shows Wit looking once again at his beloved Melanesian culture and seeing and hearing something very different from what he earlier perceived: men quarreling, children crying, scars left on young bodies by a ravaging disease, masses of human skulls. If Malick nevertheless ends the film with three luminous shots of the Solomon Islands, which are again rooted to Wit’s point of view, it is not because that character has reverted to the fantasy he inhabited at the beginning of The Thin Red Line. Rather, it is because Wit now sees in the mode of care—because he has learned how to let things Be. Although at the very beginning of The Thin Red Line Wit allows human violence to manifest itself only in a natural form, the primary story this film recounts is his slow immersion in that dark element. This process begins already with Wit’s interior monologue about his own and his mother’s death. Here he stops talking about the war at the heart of nature and begins his exploration of a much more important war. This is not, as the popular reviewers of Malick’s third film imagine, the physical conflict that is convulsing Europe and the Pacific. It is rather the affective conflict that knowledge of mortality precipitates in every psyche. We must all choose whether we will be “for” or “against” death—whether we will live “toward” our finitude or in denial of it. We must make this choice not only once, but over and over again, and each time in the face of powerful opposing impulses. Every time we decide to embrace our mortality, moreover, we immediately face a new choice. We must now decide whether we will make nothing out of the “nothing,” or whether we will progress from the “nothing” to Being itself. Once again, we must make this decision in the face of impressive countermanding forces. If it is through Walsh that Malick clarifies the first of these options, it is through Wit that he clarifies the second. Malick dramatizes Wit’s decision to live “toward” his finitude through his early meditation upon his own death. He dramatizes Wit’s journey toward Being through a series of subsequent voice-over sequences. In the first of these latter sequences, which occurs as Wit and other members of Charlie Company make their way through a forest on Guadalcanal, Wit once again talks about death. Death, however, now signifies not merely the nothingness into which all life disappears, but also the nothingness out of which

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it emerges. It consequently becomes the basis for conceptualizing everything that is as what might be called a “nontotalizable totality.” Wit uses the word all three times in his second interior monologue about death, each time with the aim of overriding the distinctions that separate one being from another. “Who are you who live in all these many forms?” he asks. “You’re death that captures all. You, too, are the source of all that’s going to be born.” With the word born, Wit seems at first to be referring only to the emergence of physical life out of the darkness of nonbeing. However, a moment later he makes evident that he also has in mind another kind of genesis. The “nothing,” he goes on to say, gives rise not merely to all of the physical forms of our universe but also to what might be called the “affirmative affects”: to “glory, mercy, peace, truth . . . calm of spirit, understandin’, courage, the contented heart.” Malick ends this sequence with a series of images of Bell and his wife touching each other in their bedroom, lit with the trademark golden light of Bell’s own flashbacks. By combining one man’s interior monologue with images of another man’s memories, Malick dissolves the distinction between self and other. In so doing, he provides a cinematic dramatization of the process of bringing together, implied by the word all. By including the shots of Bell and his wife in Wit’s interior monologue, Malick also places the emphasis once again upon the affirmative affects. The second sequence with which Malick stages Wit’s journey toward the “all” begins as he walks among the carnage wrought by Japanese land mines on the members of Charlie Company. For a moment, it almost seems as if Wit and the injured occupy separate strata of existence. The injured lie on stretchers on the ground, near a stream of water. Wit, on the other hand, stands dramatically erect. As a result of the low angle of the shot, his bare head and shoulders seem to reach almost to the tops of the highest trees. But the words Wit speaks belie this separation, suggesting that if he appears larger than life it is because he represents at this moment more than himself. “Maybe all men got one big soul that everybody’s part of,” he says in voice-over as he moves among the wounded. “All faces of the same man— one big self.” A moment later Malick gives us a medium close-up of the stream, red with the blood of the injured, and then one of Wit pouring water on the head of an injured man. In the hands of a less philosophically rigorous filmmaker, this juxtaposition would be ironic in nature. “How can we be one big soul,” we would be encouraged to think, “when we kill each other like this?” Malick, however, does not let us off the hook in this way. Rather, he tells us that we kill each other like this because we have not yet succeeded in apprehending in the indeterminateness of the “nothing” the indeterminateness of Being. As he continues pouring cooling water on the wounded man’s head, Wit says in voice-over: “Everyone’s lookin’ for salvation by himself—each like a coal thrown from the fire.” Malick then cuts

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again to the stream, exchanging the metaphor of fire for that of water. What was red with blood a moment ago now flows clear and pure. But Wit’s journey toward Being is not complete until he is able not only to see himself in the Other, but also to apprehend the Other within himself. This represents a more difficult lesson for Wit, both because of his reluctance to confront human violence and because he clings to the illusion that he will somehow be “saved” by being the one coal to return to the fire. Malick stages Wit’s encounter with the Other which he might be said to be in two different sequences. The first of these sequences occurs shortly after the storming of the bunker. Standing outside the enclosure in which the American soldiers have gathered their military prisoners, Wit looks down at the almost-buried face of a dead Japanese soldier. The dead soldier addresses Wit in the form of an imaginary voice-over. “Are you righteous, kind?” this voice asks. “Does your confidence lie in this? Are you loved by all? Know that I was, too. Do you imagine your sufferings will be less because you loved goodness, truth?” Wit’s phantasmatic encounter with the Japanese soldier comes immediately after an off-screen exchange between himself and Walsh. In this exchange, Wit asks Walsh, “Have you seen many dead people?” and Walsh responds, “Plenty. They’re no different than dead dogs, once you get used to the idea. You’re meat, kid.” This sudden confrontation with the equalizing materiality of death makes Wit aware in a new way of what it means to be mortal. From the site of the void toward which each of us is headed, a man is no different from a dog. The words Wit imagines the dead man uttering to him constitute in part a variation on this same theme: once dead, all men are the same. However, these words also perform another crucial function. With them, Wit might be said to reflect back on his present reality from the place of nonbeing, and to realize that the distinctions he has assumed to obtain between one living man and another may also be nonexistent. Malick underscores this point by having the Japanese soldier speak in the undisguisedly American voice of the virtuous Captain Staros. Finally, with the words Wit imputes to his ostensible enemy, Malick dramatizes his realization that morality can provide no refuge against mortality. No one earns an exemption from nonbeing through the virtue of his or her life. After this brief pause, the battle against the Japanese resumes. A painfully long and detailed sequence of carnage summarizes the many acts of violence committed by Charlie Company after it wrests the bunker away from the Japanese. A manifestly superior force, the American soldiers shoot at the Japanese, bayonet them, burn down their huts, and gather them, finally, into abject groups of prisoners. During a lull in the fighting, in which he has fully participated, Wit stops to think about what he has been

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doing. With this train of thought, which once again takes the form of a voice-over, Wit faces his real enemy—the violence within. At first, Wit conceives of aggression in almost Christian terms, as an extraneous evil that has stolen into a previously blameless world. He then attempts to locate it once again in the natural domain. Finally, he acknowledges that the soil in which violence grows is not material but rather psychic. “This great evil, where did it come from?” Wit asks. “How did it steal into the world? What seed, what root did it grow from? Who’s doin’ this? Who’s killin’ us? Robbin’ us of life and light? Mockin’ us with the sight of what we might have known? Does our ruin benefit the earth? Does it help the grass to grow, the sun to shine? Is this darkness in you, too? Have you passed through this night?” Even now, though, Wit does not use the first-person singular pronoun or, better yet, its plural equivalent. It is not until near the very end of The Thin Red Line that Wit is finally able to locate the war that he earlier supposes to be at the heart of nature where it belongs: in “us.” Significantly, this interior monologue occurs after Wit visits his beloved Melanesian society once again and apprehends the darkness at its center. “We were a family,” he muses, “had to break up and come apart so that now we’re turned against each other, each standing in the other’s light. How did we lose the good that was given to us—let it slip away, scattered, careless?” Although Wit’s interior monologue begins with an invocation of the Fall or, better yet, the conflict of Cain and Abel, he refuses to situate what he invokes within Christian coordinates. He ends his monologue not with another lamentation about all that we have lost, but rather with the invocation of all that awaits us. “What’s keeping us from reaching out, touching the glory?” he asks. And once again this question constitutes an implicit declarative: “There is nothing keeping us from reaching out, touching the glory.” In a closely adjacent interior monologue, Wit articulates the temporal logic informing this reconceptualization of Genesis. “War don’t ennoble men. Turns ’em into dogs. Poisons the soul,” he says. Nevertheless, no battle either predetermines the next one or provides an alibi for fighting it. Rather, “each time [one] start[s] from scratch.” For Malick, it seems, as for Heidegger, human beings have a propensity for “falling.”22 However, there is no more an action that could render us forever “lost” than one that could render us eternally “saved.” We can be said to be “fallen” only insofar as we keep “falling.” In the climactic sequence of The Thin Red Line, we see the surviving members of Charlie Company wading up a river framed on both sides by forest. It soon becomes apparent that they are metaphorically as well as literally up to their knees in dark waters. The enemy is close at hand, and

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the Americans’ position could not be more exposed. When the commanding officer orders two inexperienced recruits to track down the enemy, Wit decides to act on behalf of the most immediate totality to which he belongs. He accompanies the two recruits and, after finding the Japanese perilously near, sends them back to warn the others. Wit then knowingly precipitates his own death by diverting the attention of the Japanese soldiers from the younger men to himself. Even as he flees the soldiers who will kill him, Wit finds time to see the glory in the wildlife that surrounds him, just as he does at the moment of his death. At the moment that Wit dies, moreover, Malick shows us not only what he has just seen but also his tranquillity of spirit. He cuts to the image of Wit first swimming together with three Melanesian children underwater, and then moving upward toward the light. The water is not deep blue like the ocean at which Bell and his wife earlier gaze, but tropical green and suffused with sunshine. Although already dead, Wit utters the words with which The Thin Red Line ends. As we look with the camera at the faces of the surviving members of Charlie Company leaving Guadalcanal aboard a military ship, he asks: “Where is it that we were together? Who were you that I lived with . . . walked with? The brother . . . the friend . . . Darkness, light; strife, and love, are they the workings of one mind, the features of the same face?” We are not surprised either by Wit’s capacity to speak beyond the grave, or by the wonder with which he addresses his former comrades. By now, we too understand Wit to be part of an indeterminate Being. And in our unusual proximity to this Being, even our habitual assertions have turned to questions. Toward the end of this monologue, the camera cuts to a solitary figure looking out at the ocean from the prow of the ship, and finally moves to the vast expanse of the sea. Query now gives way to apostrophe. “O my soul, let me be in you now,” exclaims Wit in voice-over while we look at the waves produced by the movement of the ship; “Look out through my eyes. Look out at the things you made. All things shining.” With these final words, Wit returns us to the finite world. He reminds us that when we affirm Being, it is always through the phenomenal forms of the world; the “all” could not be more earthly or more diverse. With his concluding words, Wit also teaches us another crucial lesson: although we can apprehend what we are only by thinking beyond our own being, we can affirm the world only through a very particular pair of eyes. When Wit stops speaking, the sea gives way to a series of shining things: Melanesian fishermen afloat in two small canoes on waters of a forest green; two multicolored parrots; and, finally, a solitary plant growing in shallow water. With these images, Malick discloses a few of the countless features that constitute the visage of Being. Through the radiance that he imparts

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to them, he also succeeds in showing us the affect that has come to reside in them over the course of The Thin Red Line. In so doing, Malick proves the truth of an axiom once invoked by Walter Benjamin.23 Things, he helps us to understand, really do retain something of the looks that have rested on them. It is also by doing so that they become, or fail to become, “themselves.” NOTES

1. I will henceforth refer to this company simply as “Charlie Company.” 2. The Thin Red Line, www.foxmovies.com/thinredline. 3. See, for instance, Kenneth Turan, “Thin Red Line: A Distant Epic,” Los Angeles Times, December 22, 1998; and Richard Natale, “The ‘Thin Red’ Battleground,” Los Angeles Times, December 16, 1998. Oddly, Natale seems not yet to have seen the film when he wrote this review. 4. The Thin Red Line, www.foxmovies.com/thinredline. 5. The Thin Red Line, www.foxmovies.com/thinredline. 6. See James Jones, The Thin Red Line (New York: Dell, 1962). Surprisingly, for those familiar not only with Malick’s Thin Red Line, but also his previous two films, Badlands and Days of Heaven, Malick’s second draft of the screenplay for The Thin Red Line does adhere much more closely to the Jones novel (The Thin Red Line: Second Draft Screenplay [available from Script City, Hollywood]). 7. Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1971). 8. In On the Way to Language, Heidegger provides us with a category for conceptualizing this kind of disclosive utterance, whether it be linguistic or cinematic: “showing Saying” (126). 9. Martin Heidegger, “What Is Metaphysics?” in his Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1977), 108. 10. Heidegger, “What Is Metaphysics?” 103, 108, 109. 11. Heidegger, “What Is Metaphysics?” 110. 12. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1962), 173. 13. Heidegger, Being and Time, 175. 14. Heidegger, “What Is Metaphysics?” 105. 15. Heidegger, Being and Time, 228–35. 16. Heidegger, “What Is Metaphysics?” 100. In the German text, the word that is here rendered as attunement is die Stimmung, which also means “mood” (see Martin Heidegger, “Was Ist Metaphysik?” in Wegmarken, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann [Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1967], 111). Heidegger exploits this double meaning. In both Being and Time and “What Is Metaphysics?” he characterizes a mood as the attunement of Dasein to something else. 17. Heidegger himself would, of course, dispute this. He insists in Being and Time that no one can take our death away from us (284). 18. This is a concept introduced by Georges Bernanos in his Diary of a Country Priest, trans. Pamela Morris (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 157, cited by Robert

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Bresson in his cinematic adaptation of that text and by Jean-Luc Godard in his Nouvelle Vague and JLG/JLG. 19. Heidegger, Being and Time, 295. 20. Heidegger, Being and Time, 303. 21. I will elaborate further on this point below. 22. For Heidegger, “fallenness” signifies not a permanent lapse out of innocence into sinfulness but rather Dasein’s normal, everyday state, out of which it rises to more “authentic” forms of Being and to which it inevitably returns. See Heidegger, Being and Time, 220. “Fallenness” has much the same significance for Malick. 23. In the passage in which Benjamin invokes this axiom, he himself quotes Proust: “Proust’s great familiarity with the problem of the aura requires no emphasis. Nevertheless, it is notable that he alludes to it at times in terms which comprehend its theory: ‘Some people who are fond of secrets flatter themselves that objects retain something of the gaze that has rested upon them.’ (The ability, it would seem, of returning the gaze.) ‘They believe that monuments and pictures present themselves only beneath the delicate veil which centuries of love and reverence on the part of so many admirers have woven about them’” (Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn [New York: Schocken Books, 1969], 188).

David L. Eng and Shinhee Han

A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia I wondered if whiteness were contagious. If it were, then surely I had caught it. I imagined this “condition” affected the way I walked, talked, dressed, danced, and at its most advanced stage, the way I looked at the world and at other people. danzy senna, Caucasia

THE “CONDITION” OF WHITENESS

Configuring whiteness as contagion, Birdie Lee, the narrator of Danzy Senna’s Caucasia, connects assimilation to illness and disease. Separated from her African American activist father, Birdie Lee and her blue-blooded mother flee from the law in a racialized and radicalized 1970s Boston. Eventually, the two take up residence in New Hampshire, where Birdie passes as “Jesse” and for white.1 This assimilation into the whiteness of New Hampshire plagues Birdie, who wonders if she “had actually become Jesse, and it was this girl, this Birdie Lee who haunted these streets, searching for ghosts, who was the lie.” This vexing “condition” of whiteness not only alters the narrator’s physical world—the manner in which Birdie walks, talks, dresses, and dances. It also configures the sphere of the affective—the ways in which Birdie ultimately apprehends the world and its occupants around her. Physically and psychically haunted, Birdie/Jesse feels “contaminated.”2 This is the condition of racial melancholia.

IN PLACE OF A DIALOGUE

This essay is the result of a series of sustained dialogues on racial melancholia that we recorded in the autumn and winter of 1998. We—a Chinese American male professor in the humanities and a Korean American female psychotherapist—transcribed, rewrote, and edited these dialogues into their present form. However, we hope that our distinct disciplinary approaches to psychoanalysis—from literary theory as well as from clinical practice—not only remain clear in this essay but also work to supplement each another. The pressing need to consider carefully methods by which 343

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a more speculative approach to psychoanalysis might enhance clinical applications, and vice versa, is urgent. This essay, in part, is a critical response to the disturbing patterns of depression that we have been witnessing in a significant and growing number of Asian American students with whom we interact on a regular basis. “A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia” provides, then, an opportunity for us to propose several ways of addressing race in psychoanalysis, a topic largely neglected in this field. As Freud’s privileged theory of unresolved grief, melancholia presents a compelling framework to conceptualize registers of loss and depression attendant to both psychic and material processes of assimilation.3 Although Freud typically casts melancholia as pathological, we are more concerned with exploring this psychic condition as a depathologized structure of feeling. From this particular vantage, melancholia might be thought of as underpinning our everyday conflicts and struggles with experiences of immigration, assimilation, and racialization.4 Furthermore, even though melancholia is often conceived of in terms of individual loss and suffering, we are interested in addressing group identifications. As such, some of our observations bring together different minority groups—people of color as well as gays and lesbians—from widely disparate historical, juridical, cultural, social, and economic backgrounds. We are wary of generalizing, but we also hope that, in forging theoretical links among these various minority groups, we might develop new intellectual, clinical, and political coalitions. This essay is framed by two larger questions: How might psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice be leveraged to think about not only sexual but also racial identifications? How might we focus on these crossings in psychoanalysis to discuss, in particular, processes of immigration, assimilation, and racialization underpinning the formation of Asian American subjectivity? ASSIMILATION AS/AND MELANCHOLIA

Freud’s theory of melancholia provides a provocative model to consider how processes of assimilation work in this country and how the depression that characterizes so much of our contemporary culture at the turn of this century might be thought about in relation to particularly marked social groups. In the United States today, assimilation into mainstream culture for people of color still means adopting a set of dominant norms and ideals—whiteness, heterosexuality, middle-class family values—often foreclosed to them. The loss of these norms—the reiterated loss of whiteness as an ideal, for example—establishes one melancholic framework for delineating assimilation and racialization processes in the United States precisely as a series of failed and unresolved integrations. Let us return for a moment to Freud’s 1917 essay, “Mourning and Mel-

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ancholia,” in which he attempts to draw a clear distinction between these two psychic states through the question of “successful” and “failed” resolutions to loss. Freud reminds us at the start of this essay that “mourning is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on. In some people the same influences produce melancholia instead of mourning and we consequently suspect them of a pathological disposition.”5 Mourning, unlike melancholia, is a psychic process in which the loss of an object or ideal occasions the withdrawal of libido from that object or ideal. This withdrawal cannot be enacted at once; instead, it is a gradual letting go. Libido is detached bit by bit so that, eventually, the mourner is able to declare the object dead and to invest in new objects. In Freud’s initial definition of the concept, melancholia is pathological precisely because it is a mourning without end. Interminable grief is the result of the melancholic’s inability to resolve the various conflicts and ambivalences that the loss of the loved object or ideal effects. In other words, the melancholic cannot “get over” this loss, cannot work out this loss in order to invest in new objects. To the extent that ideals of whiteness for Asian Americans (and other groups of color) remain unattainable, processes of assimilation are suspended, conflicted, and unresolved. The irresolution of this process places the concept of assimilation within a melancholic framework. Put otherwise, mourning describes a finite process that might be reasonably aligned with the popular American myth of immigration, assimilation, and the melting pot for dominant white ethnic groups. In contrast, melancholia delineates an unresolved process that might usefully describe the unstable immigration and suspended assimilation of Asian Americans into the national fabric. This suspended assimilation—this inability to blend into the “melting pot” of America—suggests that, for Asian Americans, ideals of whiteness are continually estranged. They remain at an unattainable distance, at once a compelling fantasy and a lost ideal. In configuring assimilation and melancholia in this particular manner, it is important to challenge Freud’s contention that melancholia ensues from a “pathological disposition”—that it emerges from the disturbance of a one-person psychology rather than the disruption of an intersubjective relationship. In our model, the inability to “get over” the lost ideal of whiteness, we must emphasize, is less individual than social. For instance, Asian Americans are typically seen by the mainstream as perpetual foreigners on the basis of skin color and facial markings. Despite that they may be U.S.born or may have resided here for many years, Asian Americans are continually perceived as eccentric to the nation. At other times, Asian Americans are recognized as hypermodel minorities—inhumanly productive— and hence pathological to the nation. In both scenarios, mainstream re-

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fusal to see Asian Americans as part and parcel of the American “melting pot” is less an individual failure to blend in with the whole than a socially determined interdiction. Indeed, Freud suggests in “Mourning and Melancholia” that melancholia may proceed from “environmental influences” rather than internal conditions that threaten the existence of the object or ideal.6 Freud goes on in “Mourning and Melancholia” to delineate the debilitating psychic consequences of melancholia. When faced with unresolved grief, he tells us, the melancholic preserves the lost object or ideal by incorporating it into the ego and establishing an ambivalent identification with it—ambivalent precisely because of the unresolved and conflicted nature of this forfeiture. From a slightly different perspective, we might say that the melancholic makes every conceivable effort to retain the lost object, to keep it alive within the domain of the psyche. However, the tremendous costs of maintaining this ongoing relationship to the lost object or ideal are psychically damaging. Freud notes that the “distinguishing mental features of melancholia are a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment.”7 In identifying with the lost object, the melancholic is able to preserve it but only as a type of haunted, ghostly identification. That is, the melancholic assumes the emptiness of the lost object or ideal, identifies with this emptiness, and thus participates in his or her own self-denigration and ruination of self-esteem. Freud summarizes the distinction between mourning and melancholia in this oft-quoted citation: “In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.”8 He contends that melancholia is one of the most difficult of psychic conditions both to confront and to cure, because it is largely an unconscious process. Freud observes: In yet other cases one feels justified in maintaining the belief that a loss of the kind occurred, but one cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost, and it is all the more reasonable to suppose that the patient cannot consciously perceive what he has lost either. This, indeed, might be so even if the patient is aware of the loss which has given rise to his melancholia, but only in the sense that he knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him.9

Freud tells us that the depression often accompanying melancholia is extremely dangerous, characterized by the tendency to suicide.10 Here, we must add, suicide may not be merely physical; it may also be a psychical erasure of one’s identity—racial, sexual, or gender identity, for example.

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NATIONAL MELANCHOLIA

For Asian Americans and other groups of color, suspended assimilation into mainstream culture may involve more than severe personal consequences; ultimately, it also constitutes the foundation for a type of national melancholia, a national haunting, with negative social effects. In Senna’s Caucasia, the ambivalence characterizing whiteness leaves the narrator with the constant and eerie feeling of “contamination.”11 Writing about the nature of collective identifications, Freud notes in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego: “In a group every sentiment and act is contagious, and contagious to such a degree that an individual readily sacrifices his personal interest to the collective interest. This is an aptitude very contrary to his nature, and of which a man is scarcely capable, except when he makes part of a group.”12 Our dialogue on racial melancholia insists on thinking what happens when the demand to sacrifice personal to collective interest is accompanied not by inclusion within but by exclusion from the larger group. As we know, the formation of the U.S. nation-state quite literally entailed, and continues to entail, a history of institutionalized exclusions, from Japanese American internment to immigration exclusion acts, legislated by Congress, brokered by the executive, and upheld by the judiciary, against every Asian immigrant group.13 For example, from 1882 to 1943, Chinese Americans experienced one of the longest juridical histories of immigration exclusion as well as bars to naturalization and citizenship. Yet, few people realize that the first exclusion laws passed against a particular ethnic group were passed against the Chinese. These laws were followed by a series of further exclusion acts culminating in the 1924 National Origins Act and the Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934, which effectively halted all Asian immigration and naturalization. At the same time, other laws were instituted against miscegenation and ownership of private property. Discourses of American exceptionalism and democratic myths of liberty, individualism, and inclusion force a misremembering of these exclusions, an enforced psychic amnesia that can return only as a type of repetitive national haunting—a type of negative or absent presence.14 The popular model-minority stereotype that clings to Asian Americans is both a product—and productive—of this negative or absent presence.15 In its compulsive restaging, the model minority stereotype homogenizes widely disparate Asian and Asian American racial and ethnic groups by generalizing them all as economically or academically successful, with no personal or familial problems to speak of. In this manner, the stereotype works not only to deny the heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity of various Asian American groups who do not fit its ideals of model citizenry.16 It also functions as a national tool that erases and manages the history of these institutionalized exclusions. The pervasiveness of the model minority stereotype in our con-

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temporary vocabulary works, then, as a melancholic mechanism facilitating the erasure and loss of repressed Asian American histories and identities. These histories and identities can return only as a type of ghostly presence. In this sense, the Asian American model minority subject also endures in the United States as a melancholic national object—as a haunting specter to democratic ideals of inclusion that cannot quite “get over” the histories of these legislated proscriptions of loss. Before moving on, we extend our observations on the psychic consequences that this model of national melancholia exacts on the individual Asian American psyche. One compelling example comes from Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men (1980). In Kingston’s historical novel, the narrator wildly speculates about the disappearance of “The Grandfather of the Sierra Nevada Mountains” after he helps to complete the transcontinental railroad, the greatest technological feat of the nineteenth century: “Maybe he hadn’t died in San Francisco, it was just his papers that burned; it was just that his existence was outlawed by Chinese Exclusion Acts. The family called him Fleaman. They did not understand his accomplishments as an American ancestor, a holding, homing ancestor of this place.”17 Kingston understands that the law’s refusal to recognize Chinese Americans as citizens “outlaws” their existence, placing them under erasure. At the same time, she also underscores how this national refusal gains its efficacy through a simultaneous psychic internalization of its interdicting imperatives on the part of excluded Asian American subjects. That is, the grandfather’s own family refuses to recognize him. They cannot perceive his accomplishments in building the railroad as legitimizing his membership in the American nation. How, in turn, can it be possible to see themselves as legitimate members of this society? In this regard, racial melancholia might be described as splitting the Asian American psyche. This cleaving of the psyche might be productively thought about in terms of an altered, racialized model of classic Freudian fetishism.18 That is, assimilation into the national fabric demands a psychic splitting on the part of the Asian American subject, who knows and does not know, at once, that she or he is part of the larger group. In the early 1970s, Asian American psychologists Stanley Sue and Derald W. Sue coined the term Marginal Man to describe an Asian American subject who desires to assimilate into mainstream American society at any cost. The Marginal Man faithfully subscribes to the ideals of assimilation only through an elaborate self-denial of the daily acts of institutionalized racism directed against him. In “Chinese-American Personality and Mental Health,” the Sues write about the complex psychological defenses that the Marginal Man must necessarily employ in order to “function” within American society. The Marginal Man finds it “difficult to admit widespread racism since to do so would be to say that he aspires to join a racist society.”19 Caught in this

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untenable contradiction, the Marginal Man must necessarily become a split subject—one who exhibits a faithful allegiance to the universal norms of abstract equality and collective national membership at the same time as he displays an uncomfortable understanding of his utter disenfranchisement from these democratic ideals. In Senna’s Caucasia, Birdie’s unresolved assimilation into the whiteness of New Hampshire gives us a final reflection on the psychic effects of splitting in racial melancholia on the level of the signifier. Through the twinning of her name, the impossible mulatta child is marked by doubleness: Birdie (mulatto) → Jesse (white). Here, Birdie/Jesse is the object of melancholia for a nation organized by an ecology of whiteness. At the same time, she is the subject of melancholia, a girl haunted by ghosts. It is difficult not to notice that much of contemporary ethnic literature in the United States is characterized by ghosts and by hauntings from both these perspectives—the objects and subjects of national melancholia. For instance, the subtitle of Maxine Hong Kingston’s well-known The Woman Warrior is Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts.20 In “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature,” the Nobel laureate Toni Morrison writes that the African American presence is “the ghost in the machine.”21

MIMICRY; OR, THE MELANCHOLIC MACHINE

Racial melancholia as psychic splitting and national dis-ease opens upon the interconnected terrain of mimicry, ambivalence, and the stereotype. Homi Bhabha’s seminal essay, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse” (1984), is crucial here. Bhabha describes the ways in which a colonial regime impels the colonized subject to mimic Western ideals of whiteness. At the same time, this mimicry is also condemned to failure. Bhabha writes, “Colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite. Which is to say, that the discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence; in order to be effective, mimicry must continually reproduce its slippage, its excess, its difference. . . . Almost the same but not white.” 22 Bhabha locates and labels the social imperative to assimilate as the colonial structure of mimicry. He marks not only this social imperative but also its inevitable, built-in failure. This doubling of difference that is almost the same but not quite, almost the same but not white, results in ambivalence, which comes to define the failure of mimicry. Here we would like to connect Bhabha’s observations on mimicry in the material space of the colonized with the psychic domain through the logic of melancholia. It is important to remember that, like Bhabha’s analysis of

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mimicry, Freud marks ambivalence as one of melancholia’s defining characteristics. In describing the genealogy of ambivalence in melancholia, Freud himself moves from the domain of the material to the register of the psychic. He notes that the “conflict due to ambivalence, which sometimes arises from real experiences, sometimes more from constitutional factors, must not be overlooked among the preconditions of melancholia.”23 Melancholia not only traces an internalized pathological identification with what was once an external and now lost ideal. In this moving from outside to inside (from Bhabha to Freud, as it were), we also get a strong sense of how social injunctions of mimicry configure individual psychic structures as split and dis-eased—another angle from which to consider the cleaving of the Marginal Man. The ambivalence that comes to define Freud’s concept of melancholia is one that finds its origins in the social, in colonial and racial structures impelling systems of mimicry and man. It is crucial to extend Bhabha’s theories on colonial mimicry to domestic contexts of racialization in order to consider how we might usefully track this concept to explore further the material and psychic contours of racial melancholia for Asian Americans. One potential site of investigation is the stereotype. In an earlier essay entitled “The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination, and the Discourse of Colonialism” (1983), Bhabha also aligns ambivalence and splitting with the stereotype, suggesting that the process of mimicry and the phenomenon of the stereotype might be considered together. The stereotype, Bhabha writes, “is a form of knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is always ‘in place,’ already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated . . . for it is the force of ambivalence that gives the colonial stereotype its currency.”24 If we conceptualize the model minority myth as a privileged stereotype through which Asian Americans appear as subjects in the contemporary social domain, then we gain a more refined understanding of how mimicry specifically functions as a material practice in racial melancholia. That is, Asian Americans are forced to mimic the model minority stereotype in order to be recognized by mainstream society—in order to be at all. To the extent, however, that this mimicry of the model minority stereotype functions only to estrange Asian Americans from mainstream norms and ideals (as well as from themselves), mimicry can operate only as a melancholic process. As both a social and a psychic malady, mimicry distances Asian Americans from the mimetic ideals of the nation. Through the mobilization and exploitation of the model minority stereotype, mimicry for Asian Americans is always a partial success as well as a partial failure to assimilate into regimes of whiteness. Let us analyze this dynamic from yet another angle. While Asian Americans are now largely thought of as “model minorities” living out the “American Dream,” this stereotyped dream of material success is partial, because

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it is at most configured as economic achievement. The “success” of the model minority myth comes to mask our lack of political and cultural representation. It covers over our inability to gain “full” subjectivities—to be politicians, athletes, and activists, for example—to be recognized as “All American.” To occupy the model minority position, Asian American subjects must follow this prescribed model of economic integration and forfeit political representation as well as cultural voice. In other words, they must not contest the dominant order of things; they must not “rock the boat” or draw attention to themselves. It is difficult for Asian Americans to express any legitimate political, economic, or social needs, because the stereotype demands not only an enclosed but also a passive self-sufficiency. From an academic point of view, the model minority stereotype also delineates Asian American students as academically successful but rarely “wellrounded”—well-rounded in tacit comparison to the unmarked (white) student body. Here is another example of Bhabha’s concept of mimicry as nearly successful imitation. This near successful assimilation attempts to cover over that gap—the failure of well-roundedness—as well as that unavoidable ambivalence resulting from this tacit comparison in which the Asian American student is seen as lacking. This material failure leads to a psychic ambivalence that works to characterize the colonized subject’s identification with dominant ideals of whiteness as a pathological identification. It is an ambivalence that opens upon the landscape of melancholia and depression for many of the Asian American students with whom we come into contact on a regular basis. Those Asian Americans who do not fit into the model minority stereotype (and this is probably a majority of Asian American students) are altogether erased from—not seen in—mainstream society. Like Kingston’s grandfather in China Men, they are often rejected by their own families as well.25 The difficulty of negotiating this unwieldy stereotype is that, unlike most pejorative stereotypes of African Americans (but not unlike the myth of the black athlete), the model minority myth is considered to be a “positive” representation, an “exceptional” model for this racialized group. In this regard, not only mainstream society but also Asian Americans themselves become attached to, and split by, its seemingly admirable qualities without recognizing its simultaneous liabilities—what Wendy Brown terms a “wounded attachment.”26 According to Bhabha, in its doubleness the stereotype, like mimicry, creates a gap embedded in an unrecognized structure of material and psychic ambivalence. In Gish Jen’s Typical American, for instance, we encounter Ralph Chang, who chases the American Dream through his attempts to build a fried-chicken kingdom, the Chicken Palace.27 Eventually, the franchise fails, the a falling off the sign so that “Chicken Palace” becomes “Chicken P lace.” This falling-off is the linguistic corollary to the gap in the American Dream that Ralph unsuccessfully at-

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tempts to mime. Perhaps it is in this gap—in this emptiness—that Freud’s theory of melancholia emerges and dwells. It is in this gap—this loss of whiteness—that the negotiation between mourning and melancholia is staged. MOURNING/MELANCHOLIA/IMMIGR ATION

This structure of mimicry gestures to the partial success and partial failure to mourn our identifications with whiteness. Moreover, it gestures to our partial success and partial failure to mourn our identifications and affiliations with our “original” Asian cultures. Thus far, we have been focusing on the loss of whiteness as an ideal structuring the assimilation and racialization processes of Asian Americans. However, the lost object can be multifaceted. Since the 1965 reformation of the Immigration and Nationality Act, there are more first-generation Asian American immigrants living in the United States today than any other generation of Asian Americans. A majority of Asian American college students are the offspring of this generation. Hence, many of our clinical observations lead us to a more concerted focus on the relationship of mourning and melancholia to questions of immigration and intergenerational losses involving Asian identity. The experience of immigration itself is based on a structure of mourning. When one leaves one’s country of origin, voluntarily or involuntarily, one must mourn a host of losses both concrete and abstract. These include homeland, family, language, identity, property, status in the community— the list goes on. In Freud’s theory of mourning, one works through and finds closure to these losses by investing in new objects—in the American Dream, for example. Our attention to the problematics of mimicry, ambivalence, and the stereotype, as well as our earlier analysis of the history of juridical exclusions of Asian Americans, reveals a social structure that prevents the immigrant from fully assimilating. From another perspective, this structure might be said to deny him or her the capacity to invest in new objects. The inability to invest in new objects, we must remember, is part of Freud’s definition of melancholia. Given our current discussion of the ways in which Asian American immigrants are foreclosed from fully assimilating, are they perpetually consigned to a melancholic status? If so, how do we begin to address Freud’s notion of melancholia as pathological? Clearly not all Asian American immigrants are confined to melancholic or depressive states. If this is the case, how do Asian American immigrants negotiate their losses? And how do their offspring inherit and inhabit these losses? If the losses suffered by the first generation are not resolved and mourned in the process of assimilation—if libido is not replenished by the investment in new objects, new communities, and new ideals—then the

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melancholia that ensues from this condition can be transferred to the second generation. At the same time, however, can the hope of assimilation and mastery of the American Dream also be transferred? If so, mourning and melancholia are reenacted and lived out by the children in their own attempts to assimilate and to negotiate the American Dream. Here, immigration and assimilation might be said to characterize a process involving not just mourning or melancholia but the intergenerational negotiation between mourning and melancholia. Configured as such, this notion begins to depathologize melancholia by situating it as the inherent unfolding and outcome of the mourning process that underwrites the losses of the immigration experience. Let us turn to a clinical example. Elaine, a U.S.-born Korean American female college student, grew up in Texas. Her father is a professor and her mother is a homemaker. An academic dean referred Elaine to Ms. Han because she was at risk of failing her first year in college. In a tearful presentation, Elaine reported, “My parents have sacrificed everything to raise me here. If my parents had stayed in Korea, my mom would be so much happier and not depressed. She would have friends to speak Korean with, my father would be a famous professor, and we would be better off socially and economically. I wouldn’t be so pressured to succeed. They sacrificed everything for me, and now it’s up to me to please them and to do well in school.” When asked the reasons for her academic probation, she responded, “I didn’t do well because at a certain point, I didn’t care anymore, about myself or anything else.” Elaine’s case is an illustration of an intergenerational transference between the immigrant parents and child, which might be usefully described through the logic of melancholia. The loss experienced by the parents’ failure to achieve the American Dream—to achieve a standard of living greater than that which they could have putatively achieved in Korea—is a loss transferred onto and incorporated by Elaine for her to “work out” and to repair. In particular, Elaine reenacts these losses through her relationship with her mother. Elaine’s depression is a result of internalized guilt and residual anger that she not only feels toward but also identifies with in her mother. Through this incorporation, she also functions as the placeholder of her mother’s depression. This mother-daughter predicament has been widely debated in feminist circles.28 Here, the question is how racial difference comes to intersect what is a strongly gendered formation. This crossing of sexual and racial difference is a narrative that is very common in Asian American literature (especially Asian American women’s writing). Numerous stories portray the first generation (or, alternately, the second generation depending on the particular historical moment and ethnic group) as being a lost generation—bereft, traumatized, with few material or psychic resources.29 Is it, however, only at the moment in which

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the first generation acknowledges its failure to achieve the American Dream that this theme of first-generation sacrifice then emerges to be retroactively projected onto the second generation? In other words, are Asian American parents as completely selfless as the theme of sacrifice suggests, or is this theme a compensatory gesture that attaches itself to the parents’ losses and failures? Could the ambitions of Elaine’s father to become a professor in an American university have motivated their family’s immigration? Sacrifice, it is important to remember, is built upon the assumption of nonequivalence and the melancholic notion that what is forfeited and lost can never be recuperated. In turn, do children of immigrants “repay” this sacrifice only by repeating and perpetuating its melancholic logic—by berating and sacrificing themselves? Yet can sacrifice also be considered the displaced residue of hope—a hope for the reparation of melancholia, of the American Dream? Can hope also be transferred from parent to child and from child to parent? Elaine’s case evokes Rea Tajiri’s stunning video History and Memory,30 which is about a young Japanese American girl whose parents endure internment during World War II. While her mother has repressed all memories of the internment experience, the daughter has nightmares that she cannot explain: recurring images of a young woman at a watering well. The daughter is depressed, and the parents argue over the etiology of her depression. Eventually, the daughter discovers that these nightmares are reenactments of the mother’s histories in the camp. Ironically, the mother has history but no memory, while the daughter has memory but no history. For both mother and daughter, history and memory do not come together until the daughter visits the former site of the internment camp, Poston. Here she realizes that it is her mother’s history that she remembers. Tajiri’s video is a compelling example of the ways in which historical traumas of loss are passed down from one generation to another unconsciously. It illustrates Freud’s maxim that the losses experienced in melancholia are often unconscious losses. Yet, at the same time, it also diverges from Freud’s conception of the disease insofar as it posits a theory of melancholia that is not individually experienced but intergenerationally shared among members of a social group, Japanese Americans. It also departs from Freud’s definition of melancholia as pathology and permanence. Here, the hope for psychic health is stitched into the fabric of melancholia but only as an optative gesture that must be redeemed by subsequent generations. In contrast with Freud’s contention that melancholia is a classic, oneperson psychology—a permanent psychic condition if not solved within a generation—Tajiri’s version of melancholia approaches this condition from a different perspective. It refines our theory of racial melancholia as a psychic state focused on bonds among people—an intersubjective psychology—that might be addressed and resolved across generations. Indeed,

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in History and Memory the daughter’s return to Poston initiates an incipient healing process in her mother. In melancholia, the subject’s turning from outside (intersubjective) to inside (intrapsychic) threatens to render the social invisible. What is striking in both these examples, of Elaine and of History and Memory, is the manner in which the daughters’ bodies and voices become substitutes for those of the mothers—not just the mothers’ bodies and voices but also something that is unconsciously lost in them. To return to Freud, the melancholic “knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him.”31 Elaine’s narrative and the daughter’s nightmares are not their own histories. These daughters have absorbed and been saturated by their mothers’ losses. The mothers’ voices haunt the daughters. These losses and voices are melancholically displaced from the external world into the internal world of the psyche. The anger that these daughters feel toward the loved object is internalized as depression. In “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud reminds us that the reproaches against the self are, in fact, displaced reproaches against the loved object that have been shifted onto the individual’s own ego.32 In this respect, melancholia might be said to trace a trajectory from love to hate of the lost object. This hate is subsequently transformed into selfhate in the course of moving from the outside world into the internalized domain of the psyche. As such, the internal monologue that the daughters direct toward themselves should rightly be an external dialogue between daughter and mother. In the Psychic Life of Power, Judith Butler writes: The melancholic would have said something, if he or she could, but did not, and now believes in the sustaining power of the voice. Vainly, the melancholic now says what he or she would have said, addressed only to himself, as one who is already split off from himself, but whose power of self-address depends upon this self-forfeiture. The melancholic thus burrows in a direction opposite to that in which he might find a fresher trace of the lost other, attempting to resolve the loss through psychic substitutions and compounding the loss as he goes.33

This turning from outside to inside threatens to erase the political bases of melancholia. When Asian American students seek therapy, for example, their mental health issues—overwhelmingly perceived as intergenerational familial conflicts—are often diagnosed as being exclusively symptomatic of cultural (not political) conflicts. That is, by configuring Asian cultural difference as the source of all intergenerational dis-ease, Asian culture comes to serve as an alibi or a scapegoat for a panoply of mental health issues. These issues may, in fact, trace their etiology not to questions of Asian cultural difference but rather to forms of institutionalized racism and economic exploitation. The segregation of Asian American health issues into

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the domain of cultural difference thus covers over the need to investigate structural questions of social inequity as they circulate both inside and outside the therapeutic space of the clinic. For instance, not to recognize the history of Japanese internment when analyzing Tajiri’s mother-daughter relationship serves not only to repress and to deny this history but also to redouble and to intensify the source of the daughter’s melancholia. Lisa Lowe writes in Immigrant Acts: Interpreting Asian American culture exclusively in terms of the master narratives of generational conflict and filial relation essentializes Asian American culture, obscuring the particularities and incommensurabilities of class, gender, and national diversities among Asians. The reduction of the cultural politics of racialized ethnic groups, like Asian Americans, to first-generation/ second-generation struggles displaces social differences into a privatized familial opposition. Such reductions contribute to the aestheticizing commodification of Asian American cultural differences, while denying the immigrant histories of material exclusion and differentiation.34

A therapeutic process that solely attributes cultural differences to intergenerational conflict may not only result in the failure to cure; it may also serve to endanger further the mental health of the Asian American patient. MOURNING/MELANCHOLIA/LANGUAGE

This discussion on intergenerational immigration issues brings us to the corollary issue of language. Nelson, a first-generation Japanese American student who immigrated from Osaka to New Jersey when he was five, sought therapy with Ms. Han, presenting chronic struggles with depression associated with identity conflicts regarding race. Nelson’s family history reveals that he is the eldest child and has two siblings, a brother and a sister, both of whom were born in the United States. Before Nelson entered school, his mother spoke only Japanese to the children. When Nelson started kindergarten, his teacher strongly advised the mother to replace Japanese with English at home if she wanted her children to assimilate and become successful students. Despite the mother’s broken English, she followed the teacher’s instruction assiduously, speaking only English to her children. Nelson recounts a story that later took place in grade school. During a reading lesson, he mispronounced crooked as though it had only one syllable: “crook’d.” His teacher shamed him publicly for this failed mimicry and demanded to know where he learned to (mis)pronounce such a simple word. Nelson reluctantly replied that he learned this pronunciation from his mother. Nelson remembers, in particular, the social embarrassment and ridicule of his classmates. What we learn about Nelson’s case is that, although his original connec-

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tion to the primary object (the mother) was through the Japanese language, this connection was abruptly interrupted by a foreign property, English. The mother’s “poor” mimicry of English abandoned and revised the earliest mother-son attachment, one brokered in Japanese. As such, Nelson could no longer mirror himself from his mother, in Japanese or in English. This estrangement from language, native and foreign, is a double loss. While acquiring a new language (English) should be perceived as a positive cognitive development, what is not often acknowledged or emphasized enough is the concomitant psychic trauma triggered by the loss of what had once been safe, nurturing, and familiar to the young child ( Japanese). The loss of Japanese as a safe and nurturing object reveals another concrete way to think about racial melancholia in relation to Asian American immigration and assimilation. In Nelson’s case, melancholia results not only from a thwarted identification with a dominant ideal of unattainable whiteness but also from a vexed relationship to a compromised Japaneseness. Nelson’s analytic situation reveals how on two fronts ideals of whiteness and ideals of Asianness are lost and unresolved for the Asian American subject. In both instances, language is the privileged vehicle by which standards of successful assimilation and failed imitation are measured. In this sense, language itself might be thought of as a kind of stereotype, as demanding a flawless mimicry on the part of the young Nelson, whose poor performance leads him to shame and self-abasement. Nelson’s transition from Japanese to English is another good example of the negotiation between mourning and melancholia in the immigration and assimilation process. That is, although he suffers a loss and revaluation of his “mother” tongue, his transition into the “adopted” language (or ideal) of English is anything but smooth. We need to emphasize that the shaming ritual to which the grade school teacher subjects Nelson—one all too common in the Darwinian space of the classroom—is one that not merely makes his transition into English difficult but also demonizes the mother (the mother tongue and accent) at the same time. What was once a loved and safe object is retroactively transformed into an object of insecurity and shame. To the extent that the mother originally represents the safe notion of “home,” Nelson’s estrangement from his mother and his mother tongue renders it unheimlich—unhomely, unfamiliar, uncanny.35 The relationship between language and assimilation into national citizenry is developed in a short story by Monique T.-D. Truong. “Kelly” is about a young Vietnamese refugee girl, Thuy-Mai, who finds herself in the improbable space of a 1975 North Carolina classroom.36 Truong’s narrator writes a distressing epistolary monologue to Kelly, her one and only (and now absent) friend from that dark period of her life. In doing so, she mimes the melancholic logic discussed earlier. That is, an intersubjective external dialogue meant for two parties is melancholically internalized and trans-

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formed into an intrasubjective, interminable monologue of one, remarkable for its anger and depressed solipsism. What is an epistolary, after all, but an impassioned (though not necessarily answered) plea to the other? Truong’s narrator recalls their grade school teacher: Kelly, remember how Mrs. Hammerick talked about Veteran’s Day? How about the Day of Infamy when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor? Mrs. Hammerick, you know, the mayor’s wife always had a sweet something surrounding her like she had spent too much time pulling taffy. . . . Kelly, you only knew that she liked the Beths and the Susans cause they wore pink and never bulged and buckled out of their shirt plackets. I was scared of her like no dark corners could ever scare me. You have to know that all the while she was teaching us history she was telling, with her language for the deaf, blind, and dumb; she was telling all the boys in our class that I was Pearl and my last name was Harbor. They understood her like she was speaking French and their names were all Claude and Pierre.37

Truong’s story expands our discussion of language and its effects on the constitution of good and bad national subjects. Here, Mrs. Hammerick’s common language for the “deaf, blind, and dumb”—a language from which Thuy-Mai is emphatically excluded—is used to create good and bad students within the institutionalized space of the classroom. The Susans and the Beths, the Claudes and the Pierres, are all, as Louis Althusser would put it, “interpellated” by the mayor’s wife as good citizen-subjects of the classroom and consequently the nation.38 Truong emphasizes how education is a primary site through which narratives of national group identity are established, reinforced, and normalized. At the same time, the Vietnamese refugee Thuy-Mai is pathologized as Asian enemy, dismissively labeled “Pearl Harbor,” erroneously conflated with the Japanese, and implicitly rendered a menace to the coherence of the U.S. nation-state. Mrs. Hammerick is, of course, not literally speaking French. However, Truong’s attention to language underscores the ways in which an unconscious discourse of racism is circulated in the space of the classroom as a nationalizing tract. Furthermore, as Lisa Lowe points out, Mrs. Hammerick’s nationalizing tract is also a gendered discourse: “The narrator’s observations that the teacher’s history lesson addresses ‘all the boys’ further instantiates how the American nationalist narrative recognizes, recruits, and incorporates male subjects, while ‘feminizing’ and silencing the students who do not conform to that notion of patriotic subjectivity.”39 Racialized subjects, such as Nelson and Thuy-Mai, become “good” citizens when they identify with the paternal state and accept, as Lowe summarizes, “the terms of this identification by subordinating [their] racial difference and denying [their] ties with the feminized and racialized ‘motherland.’ ”40

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ON GOOD AND BAD R ACIALIZED OBJECTS

In the case of Nelson, the teacher’s shaming of the mother brings the mother’s image into crisis, reconfiguring her return in the guise of a “bad” mother. Like Elaine, Nelson, as the Asian American child of immigrant parents, becomes the arbiter of not only his mother’s ambitions and losses but also his own. His attempts to “reinstate” his first love-object and caretaker (the Japanese mother) as well as his first language ( Japanese) are torturous and compromised. Nelson’s case history brings us to the work of Melanie Klein on good and bad objects, which might be usefully factored into our discussion of racial melancholia for Asian Americans. In “Mourning and ManicDepressive States,” Klein extends Freud’s theory on mourning: “While it is true that the characteristic feature of normal mourning is the individual’s setting up the lost loved object inside himself, he is not doing so for the first time but, through the work of mourning, is reinstating that object as well as all his loved internal objects which he feels he has lost. He is therefore recovering what he had already attained in childhood.”41 States of mourning in adult life are dealt with and resolved through the alignment of the lost object with all the loved internal objects of infancy. This clustering of the lost object with the good objects of the past is, as Klein points out, an attempt to recover and hence to reinstate the securities of infancy before the mother was split into good and bad (a necessary but impossible project). In this manner, the loved object is “preserved in safety inside oneself,” and depression can be negotiated.42 Unlike Freud’s theory, then, Klein’s formulation for mourning, as well as her prescription for psychic health, depends upon the introjection of the lost object, on retaining it through a melancholic logic of internalization, but an internalization that attempts to reinstate the lost object by aligning it with a cluster of good internal objects.43 Klein warns, however, of the difficulties often accompanying this rebuilding of the inner world, this recovery and reinstatement of the lost object as “good.” Depression will surely ensue, Klein warns, when the lost object cannot be clustered with the good objects of the past. In particular, she writes about the advent of depression through the forfeiture of the “good” mother. In “The Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States,” Klein observes that from the very beginning of psychic development there is a constant correlation of real objects with those installed within the ego. It is for this reason that the anxiety I have just described manifests itself in a child’s exaggerated fixation to its mother or whoever looks after it. The absence of the mother arouses in the child anxiety lest it should be handed over to bad objects, external and internalized, either because of her death or because of her return in the guise of a “bad” mother.44

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Nelson’s case illustrates what happens when the mother returns in the guise of a “bad” mother precisely through the loss—the death—of “Japaneseness.” Nelson’s “good” mother of infancy returns as a “bad” mother of childhood at the moment of the teacher’s sudden linguistic interdiction. After this childhood trauma, Nelson cannot easily repair and realign an image of the mother as “bad” with his earlier perceptions of this nurturing figure. Klein summarizes: In some patients who had turned away from their mother in dislike or hate, or used other mechanisms to get away from her, I have found that there existed in their minds nevertheless a beautiful picture of the mother, but one which was felt to be a picture of her only, not her real self. The real object was felt to be unattractive—really an injured, incurable and therefore dreaded person. The beautiful picture had been dissociated from the real object but had never been given up and played a great part in the specific ways of their sublimations.45

Nelson’s case history challenges us to consider what must be shorn away from the shamed Japanese mother in order to reinstate her to a world of loved internal objects, in order to create from her a “beautiful picture.” In this instance, it would seem that it is racial difference—Japaneseness itself—that must be dissociated from the figure of the injured and dreaded mother in order for this reinstatement to occur. In turn, however, through the shaming of his mother and mother tongue as well as his attempts to repair them, Nelson’s Japanese identity becomes dissociated from him, repressed into the unconscious and transformed into a bad object. Nelson’s case history emphatically underscores the way in which good attachments to a primary object can be threatened and transformed into bad attachments specifically through the axis of race. What we are proposing here is the refinement of Klein’s theory into an account of “good” and “bad” racialized objects. Nelson and his mother are bound together as mourners. Nelson’s mother becomes overwhelmed with guilt about her broken English. She transfers the burden of this trauma as well as the burden of hope onto Nelson’s shoulders. As such, Nelson attempts to save himself by reinstating his mother (and thus his own ego) as good object. His fixation with perfecting his English is indicative of an obsessional mechanism that negotiates the depressive position for him. This process of perfecting English might be seen as Nelson’s displaced attempt to preserve the image of the beautiful Japanese mother. Nelson’s efforts to reinstate an image of beauty can never be fulfilled (for him or anyone). However, these attempts are a “necessary failure,” for Klein warns that if this image of beauty is removed completely—if the death wish against the mother is fulfilled—then guilt is not reduced but in fact heightened.

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Were this to happen, the self-abasement accompanying melancholia’s guilt and ambivalence would only redouble and heighten. Indeed, the racial melancholia that underwrites Nelson’s unresolved loss of the Japanese mother renders any attempt to reinstate this loved object extraordinarily tenuous. This compromising of Nelson’s efforts vexes the “proper” work of mourning, leaving him depressed. Klein states, “The ego endeavours to keep the good apart from the bad, and the real from the phantasmatic objects.”46 However, it may be that the racial melancholia and depression that ensue for Nelson can be avoided only through the most difficult psychic process of dissociation—splitting of Japaneseness from the figure of the mother as well as segregating racial and sexual difference. Klein comments, “The attempts to save the loved object, to repair and restore it, attempts which in the state of depression are coupled with despair, since the ego doubts its capacity to achieve this restoration, are determining factors for all sublimations and the whole of the ego development.”47 Nelson’s chronic depression and sustained ambivalence toward the figure of his mother indicate the torturous process of reinstatement that clearly impedes proper ego development. It is racial difference that must be attended to here. At this point, we would like to return to Butler. In The Psychic Life of Power, Butler makes the observation that melancholia instantiates a psychic topography in which the ego constitutively emerges in relation to a superego that admonishes and judges it to be lacking. Melancholia, Butler states, “produces the possibility for the representation of psychic life.”48 She makes this claim through a deconstruction of mourning and melancholia. In his first account of the disease, Freud contrasts the pathological condition of melancholia to the normal work of mourning. Later, in The Ego and the Id, Freud revises this earlier distinction between mourning and melancholia. He reconceptualizes it, Butler notes, when he realizes that the ego itself is composed of abandoned object-cathexes internalized as constitutive identifications: “But let us remember that in The Ego and the Id Freud himself acknowledges that melancholy, the unfinished process of grieving, is central to the formation of identifications that form the ego. Indeed, identifications formed from unfinished grief are the modes in which the lost object is incorporated and phantasmatically preserved in and as the ego.”49 If the ego is composed of its lost attachments, then there would be no ego— indeed, no distinction between inside and outside—without the internalization of loss along melancholic lines. Melancholia thus instantiates the very logic by which the ego and its psychic landscape are constituted. It is only after this partition of internal and external worlds that the work of mourning—that subjectivity itself—becomes possible.50 Butler aligns this deconstruction of mourning and melancholia with the

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social emergence of gender and a system of compulsory heterosexuality. She focuses on Freud’s contention, in The Ego and the Id, that the primary lost object of desire for the little boy is the father. As such, Butler argues that heterosexual male subjectivity is created melancholically through the father’s forfeiture as an object of desire and his internalization as a primary and constitutive identification. She writes that heterosexual identity is thus purchased through a melancholic incorporation of the love that it disavows: the man who insists upon the coherence of his heterosexuality will claim that he never loved another man, and hence never lost another man. That love, that attachment becomes subject to a double disavowal, a never having loved, and a never having lost. This “never-never” thus founds the heterosexual subject, as it were; it is an identity based upon the refusal to avow an attachment and, hence, the refusal to grieve.51

Butler concludes that in opposition to a conception of (hetero)sexuality that is said to reflect a natural gendered order, gender in this case is understood to be composed of precisely what remains melancholically disavowed in sexuality. Klein’s theory of good and bad objects is a useful theoretical supplement here, because she addresses something unaddressed by Butler. If a system of gender melancholy instantiates compulsory male heterosexuality, we nevertheless do not typically describe the normative male subject as melancholic or depressed. In other words, as Adam Phillips suggests, if the normative heterosexual male claims to be relatively untroubled by this disavowal, is it the task of the psychoanalyst to engineer its undoing?52 Here, the clinical implications of this undoing diverge from the speculative payoff of rethinking a system of compulsory heterosexuality. In both cases, however, Klein’s notion of the good and the bad object— of “recovery” and “reinstatement”—allows us to understand how certain losses are grieved because they are not, perhaps, even seen as losses but are seen as social gains. These include access to political, economic, and cultural privilege; alignment with whiteness and the nation; and “full” subjectivity and a sense of belonging. In other words, the loss of the father as object of desire for the little boy can be more acceptably mourned than other losses, for this “forfeiture” has widespread social support and approbation. Indeed, it provides the very foundation of oedipalization. As such, this “forfeiture” is seen not as an abandonment but as a culturally rewarded transaction. To return to Phillips, we must continue to ask why it is that the normative heterosexual white male can claim to be untroubled by his melancholic disavowals. Let us contrast this normative story of oedipalization and the “loss” of the father with Nelson’s compromised loss of the mother and the mother

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tongue. Our present deconstruction of mourning and melancholia tells us that it is crucial to recognize that all identities are built on loss. Loss is symptomatic of ego formation, for both dominant as well as marginalized subjects. The crucial point to investigate, then, is the social and psychic status of that lost object, idealized or devalued, and the ways in which that lost object can or cannot be reinstated into the psychic life of the individual in order to rebuild an internal world. It is Klein who lends us a theoretical account to make these distinctions. DEPATHOLOGIZING MELANCHOLIA

The process of assimilation is a negotiation between mourning and melancholia. The ethnic subject does not inhabit one or the other—mourning or melancholia—but mourning and melancholia coexist at once in the process of assimilation. This continuum between mourning and melancholia allows us to understand the negotiation of racial melancholia as conflict rather than damage. Indeed, might we consider damage the intrasubjective displacement of a necessarily intersubjective dynamic of conflict? This attention to racial melancholia as conflict rather than damage not only renders it a productive category but also removes Asian Americans from the position of solipsistic “victims.” We are dissatisfied with the assumption that minority subjectivities are permanently damaged—forever injured and incapable of ever being “whole.” Our theory of intersubjective conflict, intergenerationally shared, evokes Klein’s notion of rebuilding on a communal level. This notion of communal rebuilding provides the foundation for the reparation of individual psyches as well as group identities. Our discussion of immigration, assimilation, and racialization pursued here develops them as issues involving the fluid negotiation between mourning and melancholia. In this manner, melancholia is neither pathological nor permanent but, as José Esteban Muñoz, following Raymond Williams, eloquently suggests, “a structure of feeling,” a structure of everyday life. In Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, Muñoz states that, for queers as well as for people of color, melancholia is not a pathology but an integral part of daily existence and survival. He provides a corrective to Freud’s vision of melancholia as a destructive force and states that it is instead part of the process of dealing with all the catastrophes that occur in the lives of people of color, lesbians, and gay men. I have proposed a different understanding of melancholia that does not see it as a pathology or as a self-absorbed mood that inhibits activism. Rather, it is a mechanism that helps us (re)construct identity and take our dead with us to the various battles we must wage in their names—and in our names.53

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Within the continuum of mourning and melancholia is a productive gap inhabited by the various issues under discussion here: immigration, assimilation, and racialization; mimicry, ambivalence, and the stereotype; sacrifice, loss, and reinstatement. The material and psychic negotiations of these various issues are the conflicts with which Asian Americans struggle on an everyday basis. This struggle does not necessarily result in damage but is finally a productive and a necessary process. It is the work of rebuilding. “Suffering,” Klein adds, “can become productive”: It seems that every advance in the process of mourning results in a deepening in the individual’s relation to his inner objects, in the happiness of regaining them after they were felt to be lost (“Paradise Lost and Regained”), in an increased trust in them and love for them because they proved to be good and helpful after all. This is similar to the way in which the young child step by step builds up his relations to external objects, for he gains trust not only from pleasant experiences, but also from the ways in which he overcomes frustrations and unpleasant experiences, nevertheless retaining his good objects (externally and internally).54

We would like to think about the numerous difficulties of Asian American immigration, assimilation, and racialization processes in terms of “Paradise Lost and Regained.” In the work of racial melancholia there, too, lies a nascent ethical and political project. In “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud originally describes in rather negative terms the melancholic’s inability to “get over” loss. We instead focus on the melancholic’s absolute refusal to relinquish the other—to forfeit alterity—at any costs. In his essay, Freud lays out the provocative idea that in melancholia “the shadow of the object fell upon the ego.”55 In most of the Freudian oeuvre, it is indubitably the ego that holds sway; his majesty the ego’s narcissism reigns supreme. Throughout his writings, Jacques Lacan, even more, emphasizes the narcissism of the ego, reversing this particular formulation by insisting that it is always the shadow of the ego that falls upon the object.56 In this present formulation, however, we have the loved object, not the ego, holding sway. Racial melancholia thus delineates one psychic process in which the loved object is so overwhelmingly important to and beloved by the ego that the ego is willing to preserve it even at the cost of its own self. In the transferential aspects of melancholic identifications, Freud suggests, “is the expression of there being something in common which may signify love.”57 This community of love—as W. R. D. Fairbairn, Jessica Benjamin, Christopher Bollas, and others have noted—is possible only through the aggressive and militant preservation of the loved and lost object.58 Hence, the melancholic process is one way in which socially disparaged objects—racially and sexually deprivileged others—live on in the psychic realm. This

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behavior, Freud remarks, proceeds from an attitude of “revolt” on the part of the ego. It displays the ego’s melancholic yet militant refusal to allow certain objects to disappear into oblivion. In this way, Freud tells us, “love escapes extinction.”59 This preservation of the threatened object might be seen, then, as a type of ethical hold on the part of the melancholic ego. The mourner, in contrast, has no such ethics. The mourner is perfectly content with killing off the lost object, declaring it to be dead yet again within the domain of the psyche. While the ambivalence, anger, and rage that characterize this preservation of the lost object threaten the ego’s stability, we do not imagine that this threat is the result of some ontological tendency on the part of the melancholic; it is a social threat. Ambivalence, rage, and anger are the internalized refractions of an ecology of whiteness bent on the obliteration of cherished minority subjectivities. If the loved object is not going to live out there, the melancholic emphatically avers, then it is going to live here inside me. Along with Freud, “we only wonder why a man has to be ill before he can be accessible to a truth of this kind.”60 It is the melancholic who helps us come face to face with this social truth. It is the melancholic who teaches us that “in the last resort we must begin to love in order not to fall ill.”61 Both Judith Butler and Douglas Crimp isolate the call of melancholia in the age of AIDS as one in which the loss of a public language to mourn a seemingly endless series of young male deaths triggers the absolute need to think about melancholia and activism. Muñoz highlights the communal nature of this activist project—the community-oriented aspect of group rather than individual losses, of group rather than individual identifications, and of group rather than individual activism: “Communal mourning, by its very nature, is an immensely complicated text to read, for we do not mourn just one lost object or other, but we also mourn as a ‘whole’—or, put another way, as a contingent and temporary collection of fragments that is experiencing a loss of its parts.”62 A series of unresolved fragments, we come together as a contingent whole. We gain social recognition in the face of this communal loss. There is a militant refusal on the part of the ego—better yet, a series of egos—to let go, and this militant refusal is at the heart of melancholia’s productive political potentials. Paradoxically, in this instance, the ego’s death drive may be the very precondition for survival, the beginning of a strategy for living and for living on. Butler asks of melancholia: “Is the psychic violence of conscience not a refracted indictment of the social forms that have made certain kinds of losses ungrievable?”63 And Crimp ends his essay “Mourning and Militancy” with this simple and moving call: “Militancy, of course, then, but mourning too: mourning and militancy.”64 We pause here to insert yet another permutation of this political project

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in relation to the Asian American immigration, assimilation, and racialization processes we have been discussing throughout this essay: “mourning and melancholia.” EPILOGUE: LIVING MELANCHOLIA

This essay is an engagement with psychoanalysis and racial difference that belongs neither in the speculative nor in the clinical arena proper. Rather, this essay, like our theory of racial melancholia, exists in a gap between two spheres and seeks to establish a productive relationship between them. We wrote this essay with the hope of proffering a number of new critical interventions significant to both realms and with the desire to understand better our students, our communities, ourselves. It also occurs to us that our dialogue—crossing into the often disparate realms of the literary and the clinical—is an exercise in new models of communal interaction that we advocate in our various discussions on the everyday living out of racial melancholia by Asian Americans. Much of this essay reexamines the ways in which the genealogy of racial melancholia as individual pathology functions in terms of larger social group identities— as a type of “psychic citizenship.” Indeed, it is our belief that the refusal to view identities under social erasure as individual pathology and permanent damage lies in the communal appropriation of melancholia, its refunctioning as a structure of everyday life that annuls the multitude of losses continually demanded by an unforgiving social world. To that end, we conclude with a few words on one strategy of communitybuilding within the space of the university. A recent, albeit contested, trend in the academy is the establishing of Asian American studies programs. In the face of this trend, the model minority stereotype is consistently marshaled by university administrations as proof that Asian Americans neither are in want of any special recognition nor have any particular needs as a distinct and socially marked group. The popular vision of Asian Americans as model minorities, as having the best of both worlds (two cultures, two languages), is a multicultural fantasy in the age of diversity management. Our investigation here of immigration, assimilation, and racialization as conflicted and unresolved processes of mourning and melancholia reveals the link between East and West as less than fluid. For Asian Americans, the reparation of these unresolved processes requires a public language. It requires a public space where these conflicts can be acknowledged and negotiated. In their ideal form, Asian American studies programs provide this publicity, a physical and psychic space to bring together various fragmented parts (intellectual, social, political, cultural) to compose, borrowing from Winnicott, a “holding environment,” a “whole” environment.65 This type of

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public space ultimately facilitates the creation of new representations of Asian Americans emerging from that gap of ambivalence between mourning and melancholia. These new representations not only contest conventional ways in which Asian Americans have been traditionally apprehended but also refunction the very meanings of “Asian American” within the public sphere. In the final analysis, this essay has been an exercise for us to mourn the various passings of Asian American students who no longer felt tied to our present world, such as it is. However, this dialogue—this production of new ideas about the conditions and constraints of racial melancholia—should not be taken as a summary moment. Instead, it might be understood as only an initial engagement in the continued work of mourning and melancholia and the rebuilding of new communities.

NOTES

This essay was originally published in Psychoanalytic Dialogues 10, no. 4 (2000): 667– 700. We would like to thank The Analytic Press, Inc., for allowing us to reproduce it here. The epigraph is from Danzy Senna, Caucasia (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998), 329. 1. “Jesse” presents herself as Jewish (and not black), significantly complicating the racial complexities of “whiteness” in Senna’s novel. Although Jesse is marked differently from the WASPs populating her New Hampshire environment, her partJewish background is mobilized so that she can “pass.” It is ostensibly used as an explanation for her darker skin tone and hair. 2. Senna, Caucasia, 329. 3. It is important to remember that melancholia and depression are not synonymous psychic conditions, although they often coexist and can trigger one another. 4. The relationship between melancholia and processes of immigration, assimilation, and racialization is underdeveloped in both Asian American studies and clinical practice. We suggest that those interested in this intersection read Asian American literature by authors such as Frank Chin (The Chinaman Pacific and Frisco R.R. Co., 1988), Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior, 1976), Wendy LawYone (The Coffin Tree, 1983), Chang-rae Lee (Native Speaker, 1995), Fae Myenne Ng (Bone, 1993), Hualing Nieh (Mulberry and Peach, 1981), and Chay Yew (Porcelain, 1997). For a discussion of Asian American immigration, see Sucheng Chan, ed., Entry Denied: Exclusion and the Chinese Community in America, 1882–1943 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991); Bill Ong Hing, Making and Remaking Asian America through Immigration Policy, 1850–1990 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993); and Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996). For a discussion of Asian American immigration and mental health issues, see Salman Akhtar, “A Third Individuation: Immigration, Identity, and the Psychoanalytic Process,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 43, no. 4 (1995):

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1051–84; and Yu-Wen Ying, “Psychotherapy for East Asian Americans with Major Depression,” in Working with Asian Americans: A Guide for Clinicians, ed. Evelyn Lee (New York: Guilford Press, 1997), 252–64. 5. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), 243. 6. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 243. 7. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 244. 8. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 246. 9. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 245; emphasis in original. 10. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 252. 11. Here, Senna is reconfiguring a long history of “contamination” that racializes individuals with “one drop of black blood” as colored. There is also a long history that configures immigrants as diseased and contaminated, carriers of illness that infects the national body politic. Contamination is thus one theme for thinking about the intersections of African American and Asian American racialization processes. 12. Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, in The Standard Edition, vol. 18, 75. 13. For a history of these immigration exclusion acts see Chan, Entry Denied; Hing, Making and Remaking Asian America; and Lowe, Immigrant Acts. 14. See Anne Anlin Cheng, “The Melancholy of Race,” Kenyon Review 19, no. 1 (1997): 51–52. 15. For a history of the model minority stereotype, see Bob H. Suzuki, “Education and the Socialization of Asian Americans: A Revisionist Analysis of the Model Minority Thesis,” Amerasia Journal 4, no. 2 (1977): 23–51. For a critique of the model minority thesis in terms of Asian, white, and black relations, see Mari Matsuda, “We Will Not Be Used: Are Asian Americans the Racial Bourgeoisie?” in Where Is Your Body? And Other Essays on Race, Gender, and the Law (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 149–59. 16. For an elaboration of the concepts of “heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity,” see Lowe, Immigrants Acts, chapter 3, 60–83, from which this phrase is drawn. 17. Maxine Hong Kingston, China Men (New York: Vintage, 1989; originally published 1980), 151. 18. See Freud’s essays “Fetishism,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 21, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1927), 152–57; and the “Splitting of the Ego in the Defensive Process,” in The Standard Edition, vol. 23 (1938), 271–78. This argument on racial fetishization and the following discussion on the “Marginal Man” come from David L. Eng, Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001). 19. Stanley Sue and Derald W. Sue, “Chinese-American Personality and Mental Health,” Amerasia Journal 1, no. 2 ( July 1971): 42. 20. Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts (New York: Vintage, 1989; originally published 1976). 21. Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Pres-

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ence in American Literature,” Michigan Quarterly Review 28 (winter 1989): 11. The phrase was coined by Gilbert Ryle. 22. Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” October 28 (spring 1984): 126, 130; emphasis in original. 23. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 251. 24. See Homi K. Bhabha, “The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination, and the Discourse of Colonialism,” in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 66; reprinted from Screen 24, no. 6 (November–December 1983). 25. Tazuko Shibusawa points out that we must also consider how the model minority stereotype dovetails with a Confucian tradition within East Asian societies. This tradition mandates a strict hierarchical relationship among members of individual family units and between individual family units and the political representatives of the state. 26. For an elaboration of this concept, see Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). In particular, see chapter 3, “Wounded Attachments,” 52–76, in which Brown writes: But in its attempts to displace its suffering, identity structured by ressentiment at the same time becomes invested in its own subjection. This investment lies not only in its discovery of a site of blame for its hurt will, not only in its acquisition of recognition through its history of subjection (a recognition predicated on injury now righteously revalued), but also in the satisfactions of revenge, which ceaselessly reenact even as they redistribute the injuries of marginalization and subordination in a liberal discursive order that alternately denies the very possibility of these things and blames those who experience them for their own condition. Identity politics structured by ressentiment reverse without subverting this blaming structure; they do not subject to critique the sovereign subject of accountability that liberal individualism presupposes, nor the economy of inclusion and exclusion that liberal universalism establishes. (70)

27. Gish Jen, Typical American (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991). 28. See, for example, Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980). 29. The question of generational sacrifice is historically as well as ethnically specific. For example, during the exclusion era, many first-generation Asian immigrants barred from naturalization and citizenship exhibited a strong identification with their home country as “sojourners.” Consequently, it was the second generation during this historical period (especially those born on U.S. soil) who exhibited the stronger characteristics of a lost generation—for instance, the Nisei interned during World War II. After the 1965 reformation of the Immigration and Nationality Act, Asian immigrants were legally guaranteed—and in much larger numbers—access to the space of the nation-state as citizens. The narrative of sacrifice thus attaches itself more strongly to these first-generation immigrants, whose hopes for assimilation and integration into the national fabric are more evident. 30. Rea Tajiri, dir., History and Memory (New York: Women Make Movies, 1991). 31. Freud, “Mourning and Melacholia,” 245. 32. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 248. 33. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 182; emphasis in original.

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34. Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 63; emphasis in original. 35. See Freud’s essay “Uncanny.” For a discussion of the uncanny and nationbuilding, see Sau-ling Wong, Reading Asian American Literature, from Necessity to Extravagance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), chapter 2; and Priscilla Wald, Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), chapter 1. 36. Monique Thuy-Dung Truong, “Kelly,” Amerasia Journal 17, no. 2 (1991): 41– 48. 37. Truong, “Kelly,” 42. 38. See Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation),” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 127–86. 39. Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 55. 40. Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 56. 41. Melanie Klein, “Mourning and Manic-Depressive States,” in The Selected Melanie Klein, ed. Juliet Mitchell (New York: Free Press, 1987), 165–66; emphasis in original. 42. Melanie Klein, “The Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States,” in The Selected Melanie Klein, 119. 43. It might be useful here to consider Freud’s notion of mourning and melancholia against Abraham and Torok’s concept of “introjection” versus “incorporation.” See Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, vol. 1, trans. Nicholas T. Rand (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), chapter 5, “Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation,” 125–38. 44. Klein, “The Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States,” 121; emphasis in original. 45. Klein, “The Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States,” 125; emphasis in original. 46. Klein, “The Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States,” 123. 47. Klein, “The Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States,” 124. 48. Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 177. 49. Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 132. 50. Butler writes that in melancholia, the inability to declare such a loss signifies the “retraction” or “absorption” of the loss by the ego. Clearly, the ego does not literally take an object inside itself, as if the ego were a kind a shelter prior to its melancholy. The psychological discourses and its various “parts” miss the crucial point that melancholy is precisely what interiorizes the psyche, that is, makes it possible to refer to the psyche through such topographical tropes. The turn from object to ego is the movement that makes the distinction between them possible, that marks the division, the separation or loss, that forms the ego to begin with. In this sense, the turn from the object to the ego fails successfully to substitute the latter for the former, but does succeed in marking and perpetuating the partition between the two. The turn thus produces the divide between ego and object, the internal and external worlds that it appears to presume. (The Psychic Life of Power, 170)

51. Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 139–40. 52. Adam Phillips, “Keep It Moving: Commentary on Judith Butler’s ‘Melancholy Gender/Refused Identification,’” in Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 155.

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53. José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 74. 54. Klein, “The Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States,” 163–64. 55. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 249. 56. See Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, book 2: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991). 57. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 250. 58. See W. R. D. Fairbairn, An Object-Relations Theory of the Personality (New York: Basic Books, 1954); Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987); and Jessica Benjamin, The Shadow of the Other: Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1998). 59. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 248, 257. 60. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 246. 61. Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” in The Standard Edition, vol. 14, 85. 62. Muñoz, Disidentifications, 73. 63. Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 185. 64. Douglas Crimp, “Mourning and Militancy,” October 51 (1989): 18; emphasis in original. 65. See D. W. Winnicott, The Maturation Process and the Facilitating Environment (New York: International Universities Press, 1965).

Yvette Christiansë

Passing Away The Unspeakable (Losses) of Postapartheid South Africa But the urn of language is so fragile. It crumbles and immediately you blow into dust the words which are the cinder itself. And if you entrust it to paper, it is all the better to inflame you with, my dear, you will eat yourself up immediately. No, this is not the tomb he would have dreamed of in order that there may be a place [y ait lieu], as they say, for the work of mourning to take its time in this sentence I see the tomb of a tomb, the monument of an impossible tomb—forbidden, like the memory of a cenotaph, deprived of the patience of mourning, denied also the slow decomposition that shelters, locates, lodges, hospitalizes itself in you while you eat the pieces . . . jacques derrida, Cinders

On November 18, 1993, in the Republic of South Africa, the past came into being. It was a moment in which a temporal and material threshold emerged, for, at nine o’clock on that morning, the apartheid constitution ceased to be. In fact, the time of the nation was itself suspended, and a space was opened into which narratives of the past and fantasies of the future all poured. This interstitial space fell under the jurisdiction of an interim constitution whose purpose was the establishment of a newly lawful nonracial society. Where the forging of South Africa had been accomplished in blood and with force, where the first South African nation had emerged through that aporetic process in which law produces itself illegally, the newly elected representatives of postapartheid South Africa wanted to produce a law in law and from law. They wanted its own process of becoming to be lawful, politically legitimate. And in order to do so, they placed it in an ambivalent relation to the apartheid state. That ambivalence was institutionalized in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. This nonjudicial body was to provide a space for the victims of all forms of apartheid-generated violence to speak in a venue that accorded them the respect of being listened to—and hence to assist them in their move from the status of victims to that of speaking subjects. The commission was composed of three discrete sets of hearings: the Victims, Amnesty, and 372

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Reparations Hearings. The Victims Hearings were conducted in major cities and in small rural towns and included testimonies by victims and survivors of human rights violations by apartheid supporters and by those caught in antiapartheid retaliation. The commission’s purpose was also to elicit confessions of politically motivated violence and then to restrict itself to the adjudication of moral, which is to say nonpolitical, violence. This is where the matter of ambivalence was most evident. The correlative process of hearing stories of victimization not only served its cathartic function but also was in fact one of the mechanisms for eliciting the confessions of the Amnesty Hearings. This was because the stories of victimization would inevitably indict individuals and representatives of the apartheid state, who could then either be charged or, if they could prove that their actions grew out of a justifiable belief in political motivation, be granted amnesty. The telos of the Amnesty Hearings and, to a lesser extent, the Victims Hearings was information. The effect, to be achieved in time, was presumed to be reconciliation. The commission was indeed “a place [y ait lieu], / as they say, for the work of mourning to take its time.” In the course of the TRC hearings, which began in June 1996 and ran for nearly three years, a plethora of testimony was given in the Victims Hearings. As many admissions were heard in the Amnesty Hearings. But not every injury was granted a narrative space at the TRC. Many stories, many kinds of stories, were implicitly or explicitly excluded from the terrain of its inquiry and the purview of its consideration. Other kinds of stories created crises for the categorical oppositions between victims and perpetrators and were tenable at the hearings only in the guise of confession. The consequence was a certain forfeiture of the right to grieve publicly over the losses that would otherwise have found their voice at the hearings. That is to say, those losses that could not be construed as political, that were not the direct effect of the state’s activities, even if they were indirectly determined or marked by them, are now under threat of remaining unarticulated. For those who would have grieved over such losses, the burden is enormous. IT CRUMBLES

That morning in November 1993 saw the arrival of the moment everyone but apartheidists had wanted. As constitutional racism, apartheid had taken upon itself the prerogative of defining all social relations as racial, and these definitions had applied value judgments upon the relative worth of individuals, according to their place within apartheid’s lumpen categories. Racially marked individuals could be individuals only in their capacities as representatives of defined categories. According to apartheid’s logic, their individuality was a statistical one. Or was it? Buried within the logic of ser-

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iality and statistical difference was a myth of origin and a tale of contamination. In the taxonomies of race as defined by the former South African secretary for the interior, South African subjects were, in the descending order of official identity documents: Population Group (i) White (ii) Cape Coloured (iii) Coloured person of South-West Africa (iv) Malay (v) Griqua (vi) Chinese (vii) Indian (viii) Other Asian (ix) Other Coloured (x) Baster of Rehoboth (xi) Nama of South-West Africa

S.A. Citizen

Non-S.A. Citizen

00 01 20 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09

10 11 21 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 191

The startling myth of startling origin cuts away all prior habitation of the geography that came to be so contested in South African history. While whiteness is the doubled invisibility represented by the two zeros, this doubled “purity,” a numerical coding for an optic white, appears to be the origin of all race. Out of the double zero a zero-one emerges. In the descent, color accumulates, visibly, quantitatively, and so much so that there is no scale adequate for blackness in this table, and indeed the table could be used to suggest that blackness could be vanished. This was not the case. For the former secretary for the interior, blackness was a category entirely on its own and subject to completely separate identity documents that named tribal affiliations. In the table, blackness belongs neither to the category of “S.A. Citizen” nor to the category of “Non-S.A. Citizen.” Blackness is not vanished but, yes, set apart. For the table performs before our eyes its apartheid. But in this table’s descent into numerically accumulating racedness, whiteness almost disappears—almost, because the singularity of the zero not only continues to haunt right down to the zero-nine of the Nama of former South-West Africa (now Namibia), it also acts as the constant qualifying presence. There is a kind of haunting that overtakes the system; there is nothing but the zero, the absent presence. As is evident, apartheid assumed the functions of giving all meaning to all lives and of reading all bodies as the signs of this predetermined meaning. In the hierarchized racial identity schema, no single group exists/ existed on its own but is/was in a numerically assigned relation to all the others.2 The schema operates as a taxonomy of descent from the doubled purity of the double zero assigned to whiteness. Moreover, it operates as a racial topography in that the numbers and their assigned racial groups map

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out the place of each in apartheid’s schema. All journeys have been taken, all couplings made, all births have occurred to produce these identities and are entombed in them, in their language of putative scientificity, the “pure” rationality of their numbers. And yet, what held this logic together has passed away. What had been so visibly repugnant in its resistance to all ethical imperatives was signed away on that morning in November 1993. All subjects were faced with the task of having to reconsider their relation to the past, specifically its power to proscribe identity. Had some of us found something akin to an identity that was not dependent on the institution of apartheid? It had been so central, even when we had defined our lives in opposition to it. In the wake of the massive changes that have occurred since November 1993—including the democratic election of a coalition government, the drafting and passing of a new constitution, and the attempt to reconcile the present with the past in the public hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission—this essay will ask what the status of memory is in its particular relation to the sense of loss that pervades so much public discourse, even as there is a majority sense of triumph. It will also ask what quotidian narratives of loss have themselves been lost by the official discourses. Both the Victims and Amnesty Hearings raise issues of complicity. Those subject to apartheid’s displeasure speak of its full exercise of power, and what they describe are experiences and events almost at the limit of comprehension, undertaken in the private chambers of power. For many white South Africans who have received the revelations of the commission in radio or television news clips, newspaper and magazine articles, the veneer of unknowing has been lost. The ability to claim innocence about the former state’s activities against its enemies has been lost. Hearing what was done and hearing people speak of their roles in this doing change such a listening subject who has imagined herself or himself to have not known what was done in her or his favor. The speaking that took place in the commission, and continued through the Amnesty Hearings, expels the selfproclaimed innocent listener from a form of identity that required the dismissal (as rejection or ignoring) of public rumor about torture. Having listened, they stare into the space where a familiar self has been, one protected by the reassurances of apartheid’s laws and the pretense of not knowing. And yet there is another figure that would be regarded as being as complicit as such listeners. It is the figure of the person who “passed” racially. In the discussion of apartheid’s excesses, in which it is necessary to recognize that apartheid was in itself an excessive ideology, little has been said about this practice. Within the context of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the rhetoric of moving South Africa into a nonapartheid future,3 one is further struck that this space has not permitted talk about the impossibility of race, only the passing of racialism.

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This could be called the confession that never takes place. It is the confession that confesses to collusion with the apartheid state’s racism in order to escape or pass over the more radical question of race. This essay talks of passings. Specifically, it addresses two modes of passing. Both are shaped by the past. One involves racial passing, whereby people generally marked as “non-white” by apartheid claimed to be white. The other form of passing took place in the frame provided by the Amnesty Hearings, as many agents of apartheid’s violence took up the language of victimization—that very language that apartheid denied its others—in order to establish their claims to victimization by history. In both cases, categorical racial difference is called into question, not by a repudiation of the categories, but by the claims of individuals to have been able to be forced to move across the boundaries of difference and thus to be indeed homeless: a world divided according to an unevenly distributed title. Under apartheid, disenfranchised people of color claimed they had been displaced. Today, white Afrikaners make the same claim. In part, what is at issue is a sense of location or even the desire to possess a place. Apartheid placed everything with a cartographer’s desire for fixity. Everyone was caught up in its fantasy, came to believe that there was a place (apart) for them. Yet, in the question of identity, there can never be the fixity of a place. Indeed, as Levinas has suggested in Totality and Infinity, there is a constant flux in the relationship between an I and the world. One sojourns in the world, one’s stay is temporary, and this, for Levinas, is the “true and primordial relation between” an I and the world. This I “finds in the world a site [lieu] and a home [maison].” This home is in fact an “at home,” since Levinas perceives it not as “a container” but as a site where “I can, where, dependent on a reality that is other, I am, despite this dependence or thanks to it, free.” This freedom is that of the Stranger, someone over whom an I can have no power (pouvoir).4 But, in South Africa, the question for some is, Just who is the I, and who forms the we when the language of such (im)proper naming as apartheid has gone? Although the end of apartheid promised everyone a “new” and inclusive place, it is clear that not only is there insufficient geopolitical space for the newly emancipated subjects of South Africa, but also some subjects have remained, and must remain, in exile. This exile is symbolic, material, and constitutes the very limit of what can be thought in the economy of compensation. There is still no place to discuss the one who has passed, although in some profound sense, the one who has passed is the one who most exposes the limits of a discourse of race in the aftermath of racialism. It is at this moment that I am forced out from behind the protection of my undertaking here to reveal my unease about that which I am about to write, for I am about to take up this issue in ways that may be potentially obscene in their insistence that passing not be passed by. And so an alter-

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native response offers itself, namely, a resort to storytelling. In the story lies some means of explanation, of attempting to make meaning, even though this gesture—of telling or passing on another’s story, which seems easy— must be challenged. I am going to answer obscenity with obscenity and tell the story of a woman who passed. It is an ambivalent story. To begin, there is a sense of empowerment achieved in the political act of speaking back, or “back talking.” Further, there is a sense of triumph in that one can claim to be undertaking a recuperative act, or even—in the case of the woman I will write about—the acceptance of an elegiac responsibility. Yet, in the context of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, where testimonies force confessions (with or without expressions of remorse), the status of the liberal humanist confessional novel is suddenly uncertain, because it has been overtaken by victims speaking for themselves and not desiring to reassure a liberal humanist conscience. A similar predicament afflicts the status of the story offered up as simple explanation. One cannot tell a story without asking, What is the status of storytelling when all narratives have been so overwhelmed by the revelations in the commission? Autobiography and History face each other, and the latter is required to recognize the former’s infinite otherness. But what about this story? What is the status of this story I am about to tell? It is driven by grief. And it belongs to another who will never speak for herself. It uses pseudonyms because it is unreconciled with the past, the present, because, for at least one person, there is no future. This story is precisely the improper story of the moment, for there is no place for it in the official discourses about surviving under apartheid or profiting from it. It is a story that is already potentially lost and is the point of convergence for a string of losses. And in the moment in which a state attempts to reconstitute itself through the work of public mourning, this essay’s relation to the woman of whom I am about to write is one of salvage—with all the risks and problems that this gesture entails—because it is haunted by her. In this salvic gesture, this essay demonstrates its inadequacy—a mode of procession in that other face, that which settles in the moment that death situates itself in the place where life has been, and that face with its residue is everything, that everything of which Benjamin wrote: the everything “about history that, from the very beginning, has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful . . . expressed in a face—or rather in a death’s head.”5 AND IF YOU ENTRUST IT TO PAPER, ALL THE BETTER

A story then. Of a woman whom we will call Poppie, who died recently, in her sleep. It is her death that prompts some of this essay’s attempt to make sense of things that appear unspeakable in the South Africa that is still reforming itself, so close to the temporal divide that made these categories

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of old and new. Her life, begun in the old South Africa in the 1950s, and her death in the early days of the new are of no real large-scale consequence. She was and is, except to those who knew her, unknown. In fact, she was unknown even to most people in her neighborhood, just as her mother and father were in theirs, for from her parents she inherited a mode of life that would be a lie to many, especially to those who agreed with apartheid’s racial divisions. Poppie’s family passed. In South Africa’s racial typology, they were coloured,6 the descendants of a “mixing” of white and black, as it were, because the framing of the explanation of coloured is rarely articulated as a mixing of black and white: the zero always stands first in the codification of race definition. Of their family, they were lightskinned enough to live in a lower-working-class neighborhood that claimed to be all-white yet was made up of many such families who were called “playwhite” and spoken of as having “crossed the color bar.” In fact, few spoke of themselves in this way. Passing was not a conversational topic unless in tones of scandal or when the Group Areas Act was enforced or the “Immorality Squad” arrived.7 What kind of passing did they do? Passing in itself is a rejection of the notion of any inherent quality that is racially distinguishing. Such a notion is really racism’s insistence, one that, like nineteenth-century science, aspires to the severance of the subject from her own self-knowledge. Such knowing is, of course, a product and motivation of a gaze that claims to pass through the surface of the skin to what lies within and that can be discerned and understood only by that gaze. The gaze is possessive. It possesses the power to name, to give meaning. In a (Levinasian) habitual economy, it owns the world. This world is a world of language. But this gaze knows itself to possess the capacity to find and verify the very meaning that it has already given. In the presence of such a gaze, Poppie’s passing was not an overtly subversive act. It did not reject all of this. Her passing was much more ordinary and mundane. It sought to avert a gaze that would find color underneath a banal but insistent performance of whiteness. It sought to escape the shame of the kind of visibility that being marked as coloured brought. Her passing sought to change nothing but her own predicament and then to deny that this predicament had ever existed. Shall we call this complicity? If so, what kind of complicity shall we call it? Poppie came to see herself as a white woman, married to a “safely” white man who could claim a “non-African” racial purity, a Europeanness that was, in South Africa, synonymous with whiteness. In fact, her husband was the Portuguese boy who had grown up next door to her. He knew enough of her shallow family history not to ask questions, not to want to know more, and to stave off any conversations—in their married life—that visiting relatives might try to steer in dangerous directions. In the years of her married life, she had moved from one lower-working-class suburb to another, this

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last move settling her right across the road from the first school she had attended, passing as a white girl. As an adult, she rarely left her home. She lived with the music she loved but never pursued the career in music she had dreamed of. It seemed that there was a ceiling to her pursuit of that other, all-consuming dream of being white. When she died—suddenly, in her sleep—relatives who had left South Africa in the hope of a different passing, a crossing of borders in an act of rejection of apartheid (which produced its own mourning), heard of her death through related conversations and calls. No one knew anyone who had been to her funeral except her immediate family members—her husband, her son, her daughter, their spouses, her own estranged brothers and sister, their spouses, and their children. No members of her extended family, those relatives who could be visibly marked as coloured, were present. And few outside her immediate family now hold a memory of her. The success of her life was that it had been an end in itself, as her passing was. Only two years before she died, she had begun to be interested in her parents’ backgrounds and had even bemoaned the fact, though briefly, that she knew nothing of where her family came from. On the subject of passing, it is familiar to ask what was so desired in whiteness. A look of recognition? Which would affirm some successful crossing, some successful passing into another being? To be addressed? To have a fixed address, or as close to a sense of an identity as one could have? Yet, what can it mean to ask these questions in the case of someone who denies one identity as it is received and desires another as it is denied? Where is the point of address when there is only the mythic double zero of all South African racial origins as it is portrayed by the identity document’s schema? What was it that whiteness was to have given her? Perhaps one must ask, What was it that whiteness asked of her? For an answer, one looks to the gesture that she, like so many, made. It was a gesture of identification in which she agreed to give up her own alterity in the hope of a communality that the state of whiteness was imagined to constitute. And in this lies a question about whiteness itself, for her life of virtually complete seclusion— from even old school friends who lived just a suburb away—could be said to be a revelation in that it exposes the fiction of whiteness. Having passed so successfully that she was able to go to a government school, where the most rigid scrutiny of birth certificates took place, she seems not to have found any great triumph in her life or even material advantage. There is no state called whiteness. There is no whiteness, but a series of illusions. One of these illusions is the projected impression that there is a “place” at which one arrives if white. This is the place of an “I” who does not feel the violence of a dislocated self, a self forcibly put out of joint with the self (as Fanon so graphically describes the predicament of being inter-

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polated as black).8 But, despite the absence of a place called whiteness, the obsession with placement and the desire to possess “it” remains. Such is the illusion. If, as I am suggesting, Poppie desired to identify with whiteness, her dislocation from a non-white self was already a forced removal from an identity assigned to her before birth. It waited there as her home. And yet this home was nowhere. There was no place to belong, only the dream of the dream of some strange and impossible habitus for the huge disappointment of passing. Poppie’s life shows that even those who claimed to be white were in a sense passing: always in motion, in search of the fixity they so desired. More powerfully, desiring to pass for white, when marked as coloured, helped to maintain the illusion that whiteness was the ideal, which it was. For Poppie and others like her, the desirability of this was proven by others’ desire to reach it too. Ironically, what fell away in this was the fact that the aspiration of someone like Poppie was precisely the fear of racial purists. In her passing, she changed the schema of racial descent into a ladder of approach even as she secreted herself into a category whose hold is so tenuous that it can proceed only through constant negative comparativist logic. She made herself one thing because it was not the other thing in which she found only a self to be ashamed of. This secreting threatened the claim to an intrinsic racial identity and, yes, made it something at which one could “play.” But, when one asks again what it was that whiteness was to have given her, even when such a question comes close to the obscenity of a judgment, Poppie’s story offers an easily recuperated end. When I spoke with her two years before her death, Poppie did not welcome the changes in the country. She was adamant that “the kaffirs” were going to ruin the country now that “they” were in power. Her running commentary is familiar and familiarly, banally, astonishing. It was forged from the lexicon of racism’s clichés in the setting in which we had both encountered them as children—in the domesticity of apartheid, that very space into which the Truth and Reconciliation Commission could not venture. She had not passed to challenge racism. She had passed to escape the shame of finding herself as it saw her. And in that escaping, she had sought something of the privilege that racism claimed for its own—the privilege of being out of the constant view of the laws that protected racial boundaries. Not that this was ever really thought out in such explicit terms. The subject was absolutely verboten. An injunction existed against laughter over or utterance about the thwarting of the Immorality Act. Implicitly, the state recognized that, in such utterance and laughter, something escapes the totality of the larger abstraction “whiteness.” This something is an effect of the kind of confrontation that Levinas envisaged in the moment that one comes face to face with the other.

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There is no trickster narrative in Poppie’s story. Yet there were rules everywhere against “giving the game away.” For this was a serious game, the game of “play white.” The gap was always there, so too the injunctions against visits by certain relatives, against coming at unexpected moments, against bringing people who could never be mistaken for anything but black or coloured. Thus, Poppie’s passing supported the notion of an inherent racedness, and she, like her mother, was constantly afraid of the betraying sign, even of recognition through association. Even as they came to believe they were white, they themselves acted as though there was something within, a something that would act as an inherent injunction against the dissolution of apartheid’s improper naming. They feared a “natural” indelibility that would always betray itself, and the greatest threat came from others in comparison with whom they would suddenly be recognized “for what they were.” The invisibility that Poppie sought was possible only if whiteness was invisible. Now, this whitening is associated with the bare bones of death. And that aspect of her that should keep moving, the memory of her, is subject to rigor mortis outside her immediately family. Poppie’s passing had become a life’s work: an end in itself. As such, it had to be racially, physically circumscribed and local, for it would risk exposing itself if it went traveling. An end in itself, passing became a place of repose. Thus, it was domestic. Yet a public secret, an intimacy known everywhere. The double zero of apartheid’s identity documents remained the illusion, not the reality of nothing and nothing, nowhere and nowhere. This is the radical blow that must always be staved off, always subsumed behind the illusion of optic white. And yet, the trauma has always already begun. The zero attaches itself, floating as if a comparison and an origin, the source of all definition. It is repeated, uncannily, but when it comes back, it is suddenly visible and therefore no longer quite white. Poppie’s whiteness had to be kept at home, but it had nonvalue unless it was circulated. It must be stressed that this essay does not tell Poppie’s story in order to make a judgment. Neither does it seek to render her as an abject figure, even though, in refusing to draw attention to herself, the life that was open to her was one of the most commonplaceness. I cannot ask if Poppie was a liar in the Nietzschean sense of refusing to see what she saw if she looked at herself. The question would be misdirected, because, surely, seeing had already occurred before she encountered herself. As suggested above, she had been seen and she had been shown herself as she was seen, and she rejected this. Her rejection, however, walks into the mirror, as if it is real and as if, in entering it, her presence there will be become real. What is lost is the encounter with the real. The encounter was lost before she arrived, because apartheid’s identity schema failed to see her or, in the Nietzschean definition of a lie, refused to see her as she was. Entrusted to paper,

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the manifold losses of her story become evident. A full silence now surrounds her passing but for the noisy—extraneous—business of my mourning. Ironically in her death, she has slipped into an invisibility that, in life, she sought. This invisibility is the new mode of loss. For she has passed away, a death that was so quick that her passing remains, for me, unreal. If she ever uttered more than her momentary sense of loss about her deeper family history in that brief conversation two years before her death, this loss has been lost and its possibility has become, impossibly, mine. The page becomes the most fragile urn, in greater need of protection that, in the space of secrets, is already betrayed. There is no knowing what will happen. And, in the matter of haunting, having let one spirit in, others will surely follow. HE WILL EAT HIMSELF UP IMMEDIATELY

In 1999, over five years after apartheid’s constitution ended, a woman— we can call her Marie—recounted with some pleasure how her father had found out that he was adopted. Marie recounted this to an aunt who was the adoptive sister of her father. It was this aunt who had located Marie during a visit to America, decades after they had seen each other last in Johannesburg. The aunt confirmed Marie’s story of her father’s adoption and added that there had been rumors that his father was a Portuguese sailor who had passed through Cape Town. The rumor was as good as something proven, for Marie. The confirmation was crucial, for this aunt was a coloured woman. And Marie’s father, let us call him Frank, had been raised as a coloured man in a coloured family but had passed as a white man all his adult life. As with Poppie, he married a safely white person. His wife’s father was German, her mother, Afrikaner, although it was the German (grand)father that mattered as Marie spoke, asking her (adoptive) aunt if she had known him well. Marie’s parents had five children, of whom Marie was the eldest girl. While Poppie’s husband did not want to know anything of her background, Frank’s wife knew of his coloured family, as an adoptive one, a fact he had disclosed to her. Like him, his wife came to accept his (adoptive) mother as a substitute mother, her own mother having died when she was a teenager. Her children called Frank’s (adoptive) parents Grandpa and Grandma. Yet it was she who traveled to the Cape in search of his real parents, ostensibly for his sake. Neither father nor mother was found. In Frank’s self-birthing narrative, which Marie reiterated as her own history, his (adoptive) family is not so much lost as cast away. This casting away occurred first in her father’s displacement of them when he moved in search of his “true” and “natural” kin. His wife repeated the gesture when

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she went in search of his “real” family, wanting to find, especially, that true father. Their daughter repeated it yet again a generation later when she met with her (adoptive) aunt, a woman whom she described as having taught her “everything there was to know about life” but whom she passed by as she pursued, vicariously, her mother’s journey in search of an impossible, founding, father. Marie’s story is inseparable from her father’s. It insists, in a polite, reasonable voice, that there is an intrinsic raced identity and that an individual will know this as if obeying some homing device. In Marie’s story, there is a place called whiteness. It is the place of the father. It summons the son who has been wrongly placed or misplaced, lost to his own kind. The obedient son understands and sets off—with Great Expectations?—in search of the sameness that he believes will recognize him instantly. This recognition will be performed. A journey will be undertaken, ironically not by him but for him, as if there is a clear map “back.” Indeed, his wife did “recognize” him, and she went, also as if in obedience to the voice of the missing father, to find him and to pass her husband back to him. Through the body of this wife whose own father is unimpeachably white, he is returned to his natural and rightful lineage. Moreover, his wife confirms that the real and true father is the one who resides implacably incorruptible in the zone of origins. The Cape is, historically, the landing place of South Africa’s doubled zero of whiteness. It is the site of the former Cape Colony and landing place of European settlement—the home, then, of founding fathers. Although it was the Dutch who formed the first settlement there in April 1657, it was the Portuguese who first sailed to the Cape of Good Hope in 1487, when Bartolomeu Dias was the first to navigate beyond it. Purity, especially racial purity, is the domain of the “foundling’s” father. He gives it a name, whiteness-as-purity, and he is its face. He protects it and bestows it upon his children, especially his daughters. Confronted with apartheid’s racialized social structure, Frank and his wife insisted on the ready-made place for himself and their children in the identity document’s schema. He and his children journeyed together, from 04 to 00. Too much race, four times that of the zero of purity, had produced a lack: the zero of negativity. What was lacking was a desired purity, conflated now as the lack of the cherished father. The symbolic identity of the assumed double zero staves off this lack as a doubled beacon of reassurance. And yet, decades later, here was an aunt, adoptive or not, sitting before Marie as the punctum in the otherwise neat family picture, which Frank’s adoption had almost lost but which could be narrated now, replete with the empty chair. This aunt is the one who remains. And who reminds. The Cape was always miscegenated. Those founding fathers, so long at sea . . . they too came to pass. But that is another story in which there is a loss for Frank, for his wife,

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for Marie. The “true” father is never found. He hovers as the trauma of the real, in that the face that Frank desires to see in the mirror is the absence that is defined by its passing out of sight. He glimpses something, a beloved lost to him by the circumstances of his (unfortunate) adoption. Yet, even loss has passed, in that, gazing into the mirror, he imagines a loss that has been converted into fulfillment of a dream. Never finding that Portuguese sailor is the distance that keeps him passing, always passing, moving on those Latinate feet. Trying to step back up the identity ladder, from 04 to 00, Frank tries to see his skin as olive and denoting a swarthy Europeanness. He tries to see his eyes as intrinsically Portuguese. And what he wants to see is seen and confirmed by his wife, by his daughter, who sees all over again, all these years later when she looks into her aunt’s face and sees only adoption and the difference that is inserted by the distance of looking from the position of a doubled zero to a zero-four. In this moment, Marie’s aunt is lost. Her alterity is the confirmation of Frank’s difference from her and his sameness with the symbolic, impossibly fixed, identity of whiteness. Frank, his wife, his daughter have seen what the schema of apartheid’s identity documents want: the zero of his origin in a moment of recognition in which all of the quadrupled distance between himself and the fantasy of purity would be overcome. But, how far can a son travel in the terrain of race without “losing” all hope of return? And how can he effect a return, in the eyes of his father? Perhaps something of an answer hovers in the story Marie eventually told. This story lay behind her narrative of the years since she and her aunt had last seen each other. It was her story, but where does what she remembers belong in the contemporary language of the reconciling South Africa of the second democratic election? Her story is that of violence at her fathers’ hands. This violence had begun in Marie’s childhood and continued until she escaped it in her early twenties. The escape had been effected by a marriage to a man who understood that the only way her father would permit her to leave his home would be to enter another man’s home in a “lawful” and “moral” way. This marriage was also into safe whiteness: the high altitude whiteness of a Swiss man. Before then, at the age of eighteen, Marie attempted to run away from home. She told of being taken in by parents of a friend but of being found by her father, who took her back to their mining town outside Johannesburg, whereupon he drove straight to the local police station. There he called for the police officers (all white, all men) to witness what he was about to say. She told how he told them to take a good look at her, to remember her so that they would know her when they saw her. Marie told of being taken into an interrogation room while her father went into another with the police to drink and explain more to them about his daughter. She described how the police sergeant came into the room and moved

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to stand behind her, placing his hand down her blouse and saying her father had told him what “kind of girl” she really was. Obediently, she went home. Frank’s story of passing has become his daughter’s, and it is in her that he is returned to his true father. For Marie, there is no issue of passing. Passing itself has passed away in her life. She was and is white. She believes that her real grandfather was a Portuguese man in the Cape. Her children are white. Yet, in Marie’s story of an intrinsic whiteness, which her “pure” mother recognized and which her father obeyed as if drawn by a homing device, the one who disappears is, indeed, his birth mother. As in Poppie’s story, what is lost is all history (all histories) that does not (do not) conform to the narrative of descent from a founding father. Marie is terrorized by being exactly what her father had produced. Indeed, Enlightenment history was itself the origin of these other narratives of contamination and descent. Just as Marie was terrorized by the prospect of being passed among men, historical record shows how, in the founding moments, black women were passed among men. The assignation of zeroone for Cape coloured is both a geographic and a temporal reminder of aspects of Afrikaner history that begins with the landing of a predominantly male population in the Cape in 1652. This population established in its midst a large hostel of slaves, among whom were women who served as prostitutes to white men every evening while male slaves ran errands that included carrying the sedans of the few white settler wives to and from their social engagements. This early history is also one in which Khoi women were indentured on Dutch farms run by single white men who clearly availed themselves of these women.9 This is the history experienced by women like Krotoa,10 and remembered, through repression, by white women who implicitly sought to keep white men from dallying, spreading their seed, and generating children of a (re)markable color. NOT THE TOMB HE WOULD HAV E DREAMED

The narrative of contamination and descent spelled out by the identity documents and their attendant laws is materialized viscerally in an edifice built in the 1930s to honor South African history as envisaged by Afrikaner nationalists. The materialization is not neat, however. Standing on a hill outside Pretoria, South Africa’s administrative capital, a large bronze statue guards the entrance to a building within which a series of marble panels depict key moments in the Afrikaner acquisition of that land upon which they built their nation. This guardian statue is of a Voortrekker (pioneer) mother and her two children, a son and daughter. They gaze up at her as she gazes ahead. Ironically, she looks over to the arc of the parliamentary buildings, from which the rule of apartheid was administered but where

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Nelson Mandela took his oath of office in 1994.11 Behind her lies the history from which she and her children emerge. This monument was imagined by the architect Gerard Moerdjik and his Afrikaner nationalist clients as having the status of a book of the Bible. Describing his design, Moerdjik claimed to have put himself in the place of the Dutch pioneer who “would have consulted The Book. Like Abraham, when he left Ur of the Chaldees to found a new state, he would have made his monument a religious one.” In a moment of disingenuous humility in the face of such “monumentally” conflating hubris, Moerdjik writes: “In reading of Abraham’s experiences, he would time and again have come across the words: ‘ . . . and there he builded an altar. . . . ’ This, then, was the motive in designing a plan for the Voortrekker Monument.”12 At the heart of this “altar” is a cenotaph sculpted out of Carrara marble and bearing the inscription “Ons vir jou Suid-Afrika” (We for you South Africa), the final phrase in what was the national anthem until it was displaced by “N’kosi Si Kelele Afrika.” It is upon this cenotaph that Afrikaner versions of South African history are founded, for this cenotaph is the empty grave of a founding father. It is the tomb of a man named Piet Retief, who allegedly signed the first crucial land treaty in what is present-day Kwazulu Natal. Afrikaner history claimed that Retief had signed this treaty with the Zulu paramount Dingaan in 1838, only to be slain by this same paramount. The avenging of Retief is what gave rise to another foundational myth, that of a covenant between Afrikaners and God at the sight of the winning battle that defeated Dingaan and the Zulus. The treaty is said to have been found miraculously intact after months in the open air.13 Retief’s body is represented by the cenotaph, or, more correctly, it is the interior that lies under the oath “Ons vir jou Suid-Afrika” that signifies the space of this founding father’s “remains.” His body may be missing, as are those of other founding fathers, but in the unified collectivity, in the “We” of the oath, there is a spatial presence. Indeed, this is remarked upon by the narratives that the marble panels perform within the monument. The panels claim to tell where the father has been, at all times. They bear witness to his fidelity to the Boer/Afrikaner dream of racially pure selfdetermination. He has never strayed, the panels declare under oath, and, of course, the oath is the name of the father. It mutters away to itself now, as the steady stream of pre-April 1994 visitors has trickled away. It mutters as if it must eat its own words in a final mimicking of that doubled zero, turning and turning upon itself and into itself. The double vacancy, double nothingness, the repetition of absence, the no-whiteness is . . . yes, a nonwhiteness. It is the echo of something that the monument has sought to cover and over which its archetypal guardian angel, the Voortrekker Mother, has stood watch, gazing out as her children gaze anxiously at her. What is it that they do not look at? Why must their eyes be fixed upon

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her? What is it that her gaze blinds her to? What is it that she must not see? What is it that she does not (must not?) look at? The emptiness of the tomb is loud: walk into the monument and make a noise yourself, and it will shout you down with its stern gleaming marble surfaces, its acoustic mirror. The Voortrekker mother looks but does not see the Afrikaner male’s relations with black women, and she averts her eyes from children that may not be white. Averting her eyes, she is quiet and resolute, as quiet as stone. The silence of this history that the monument represents is the space of a desire to affirm boundaries between black and white. These boundaries have a form in language, the form of a slash, a cut: a slash that forces the black/white opposition. Present but inaudible, the slash became, in fact, the seam of a miscegenated presence. This is the history from which the Voortrekker children must avert their gaze, since, as the Bible tells them, to gaze upon a father in his moment of nakedness is to incur the mark of Ham. In one euphemism of Afrikaner racism, miscegenation and blackness were read as the mark of Ham. To bear this mark was to be cast out of the nation.14 The cenotaph encloses a nonexistent corpse, indeed, substitutes for it. But in substituting for an absent body, it produces a residue, the effects of which can be felt reverberating through History. Every white South African that sacrificed himself or herself to the name of the father, or, worse, sacrificed others to the father, is now confronted with the remaining fact: there is nothing in the place of the father’s cenotaph; it was all for nothing. Confronted by this, the naked shame of the father is felt by such sons. And the monument, now ridiculous on its hill, shouts impotently from behind the mother’s skirts. In the most brutal of ironies, those who policed racial boundaries and who criminalized encroachment upon these boundaries are now themselves passing as victims. Something of the monument’s shouting down occurred in the Amnesty Hearings, although in the tones of reason, of logic, of recourse to law. The language of “just” and justified action could be heard over and over. Generals, former generals, rank-and-file officers, civilians, doctors, lawyers, religious ministers, government ministers, schoolteachers all came forward to explain how they had conducted themselves when they were not going about their daylight hours in public space. In the language of reason, apartheid’s agents could say that they were rightfully pursuing enemies when they applied electric current to a man’s testicles, when they forced a woman to lean her breast into an open drawer which they then slammed shut, or when they delivered a man’s body to his family with garbage stuffed in the cavity from which his brain had been removed. As the identity document’s schema has shown, the zero upon which their rationale was pinned is the definitional and mediating origin of all other definitions and identities, implicitly making provision for identifying a “criminal of the state.” Chil-

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dren demonstrating against a curriculum could therefore be justifiably identified as enemies, as could their parents who came searching for their bodies. There was no shame. And then there was. Thus, the legal advocate for former police commissioner General Vincent van der Merwe could address negotiations that were to establish the TRC in 1995 by describing his client as a man who mourned the loss of his former self and the respectability that apartheid’s moral economy had afforded him: “Yesterday afternoon when we were flying to Cape Town, the general was staring out of the window of the plane. The sun was setting and he said to me, he said in this choked-up voice: ‘The politicians have prostituted the police. Once I was a proud policeman, but here I am today—humiliated and despised. My career, to which I dedicated my entire life with such pride, is ending in this horrible shame and dishonor.’ ”15 The negotiations to establish the parameters of the commission were clearly forcing the eventual reorientation of the moral law from its (ab)use by apartheid. In its frame, what was once this moral law’s enemy was being made respectable. And what was once commanded and policed, the appellation of pride and honor, respectability, was shamed and dishonored. The general’s sense of loss is, of course, not isolated. Far more specific languages of loss have been articulated by groups such as the Boer Nation, whose web page is the most ironic “home” for a group of people who believe that they have lost their nation to differences that are unacceptable. They believe that there is a place for them, one that is their natural possession. Apartheid’s collectivity demands of them, still, that constant affirmation of a “we” and an “us” against the lumpen categories of “them” and “you.” Having believed in apartheid’s totalization of relations, such subjects refuse the face-to-face encounter with radical alterity. They revert to the frame of the habitual economy, and their speech of loss becomes the language of possession. Perhaps it is timely here to recall once again the gaze of that bronze statue at the entrance to the Voortrekker Monument. Her gaze emerges straight out of Afrikaner history. In fact, the trajectory of her gaze actually begins behind her. Temporally, it is also before her. And, since her gaze is in fact that history, it desires to extend this history into the future. Through the woman, this history desires to forestall its being lost in time. Moreover, since this history is inseparable from a refusal to recognize the radical alterity of others, it is a history of lies in the Nietzschean sense. Extending itself through the gaze of the Voortrekker Mother, whose eyes are supposed to be fixed upon the future, this history desires to extend the time of its lies. Thus, when defenders of apartheid’s excesses can borrow the language of Mandela’s Rivonia trial speech to refer to themselves as a beleaguered, oppressed group, everyone who stands outside this logic must, surely, shudder, because all efforts to find something akin to truth are being mocked.

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And what is most at stake is language, for, surely, now it is in grave danger as the language of apartheid attempts to retain a stronghold on the time from which it has been expelled, as the language that would seek the decomposition of this time itself. In some ways, it is right that the Voortrekker Mother stands outside the monument from which even her purity is expelled. For, what is the monument but an urn that holds the space in which the father resides in all his capacity as occupier. This is a capacity that expels the mother, all mothers, including especially those who are hidden. This urn is also the archive, then, of a history in which the father reveals himself as history, in that he is, in its most godlike connotation, the maker of history. It is this archive before which Poppie would place herself, as the proper mother and daughter, facing out in a way that would present her face for all to see. And yet, it is this archive that kept her hidden, for it is a stern one whose ukase of purity, once believed, can never be disobeyed. In the utter obedience of her seclusion from the world in which she would come face to face with disbelief and challenge, exposure, Poppie maintained the archive of “the” father just as surely as the “rightful” and pure mother does before the actual monument. More, she affirmed its claims and repeated, once again, its defacement of her existence as an interlocutor in history. IN THIS SENTENCE I SEE

And what of desire in this? What is the relationship between desire and language, that is, the language of naming, if this language can be, like discourse in a Foucauldian sense, an instrument of capital—and here it would be helpful to remember that apartheid presented itself as a muscular capitalism. This capitalism was also firmly bound to the formation and maintenance of whiteness, a status that would be the recipient of all prerogatives. In the logic of apartheid these prerogatives would seem as though they accumulated naturally around whiteness. In this way, whiteness could appear as real and, more, naturally attractive. Apartheid’s capitalism then, relied upon the extraction of the maximum amount of surplus value to ensure the increase of whiteness.16 Within such a schema, apartheid’s language of naming could indeed operate like money in a Marxist as well as a Foucauldian frame. It would conceal not only its commodification but also its circulation in an economy of exchange. Foucault would have it that desire would be the escape. Poppie’s reconstruction of a racialized self, for herself, might appear to be a desire for whiteness, but if Foucault is correct, desire is a gesture toward the traversal of boundaries or borders. What remains evident in Poppie’s life is her wanting to be white. It is a matter of identification, of staying within the very schema that she struggles against by hiding within its own gaze. In her passing as a white woman who could

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be married to a white man, Poppie, like Frank passing as a man who could be married to a white woman, constructs a self who can be desired. She wanted to be desired, by white people. Of her own desire(s), only silence answers. She became not an agent of desire but an instrument of apartheid’s own language of naming. Poppie would in fact be devoid of desire. The transgressive possibility of a Foucauldian desire was not available to her, confused as she was by apartheid’s naming. She did indeed want to cross the limits of the name coloured, to be on its other side, but did not want the orgiastic power of such transgression. Rather she slipped across, unseen, passing. Hence the pathos of not-not-passing and of not even allowing for the thrill of the desire to be transgressive. If apartheid’s language of naming operated/operates at the level of the commodity, the thing with social power, and if it can be said that this operation masks its power in matters of exchange, the desire that Foucault would offer as an effective redemption through transgression is unthinkable in Poppie’s case. She merely reinscribed herself in the waiting room of racial commodification. She simply redistributed herself as a thing among things. Whiteness was simply one of these things, in spite of all its claims to transcendence above all racial marking. And yet the longed-for whiteness and its hoped-for concessions and prerogatives masked themselves in the doubled zero of invisibility in the way that money and language can (as instrumentalities). The desire that was not accessible to Poppie or to Frank and his daughter was the desire to lodge between things. This space had been fully marked out by apartheid’s language of naming. It was the space of “the coloured,” the “in-between.” This space was where apartheid’s language of naming became the language of accusation, for coloured was also, stereotypically, the named space of the orgiastic in its most debased representation. It was the named space of grotesque nothingness or, paradoxically, excess, a space rendered as pathological rather than gloriously productive. Coloured was the named space that Poppie and Frank and his daughter all dreaded. Further, to be in that space was to be in the silence of all those competing voices that haunted the official histories of apartheid. Ironically, in the South Africa of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, where these voices have been invited to come forth and discharge themselves of their victim status, it is someone like Poppie—and, to a lesser extent, Frank and his daughter, who continue to live in the belief that they have acquired all the gains of passing that they had dreamed of—who has truly been left in silence. It is the silence that speaks from the space of death—a death that has not reached a space of rest but continues to be caught up in the instability and the restlessness of that transitive passage, of passing, of coming to pass, always and again. And one must ask then, for the question is forced when standing before the grave of someone like Poppie, For whom was the name “coloured”

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intended? It is clear who was to answer to it. But who was the receiver of the name if it was to act as a tag, a label that included the value of what was being labeled? A label is intended for a viewer, a reader. In Poppie’s case, as I have been improper enough to recount it, the label has not been allowed to apply to her. She turns her face, and it is the face of a headstone that comes into sight. She would dread the label finding its home on her gravestone and giving to a mourner the very name she had wanted to escape. And it is I, the writer of this essay, who gives her this name, again, when she was so adamant that it not apply to her. What then of the urge to remember, even that which Poppie wanted forgotten? It is as if I obey a promise made even before I was born. Remember. Construct the archive. Find a place for it, and maintain it against all amnesiac blows. The sense of loss is too potent, too close. While my writing is not intended to claim the status of a historian who obeys the urge to remember, the challenges raised by Edith Wyschogrod echo my own concerns about the act I am performing in remembering Poppie, Frank, and his daughter. Wyschogrod describes the historian who obeys the injunction to remember as “the agent of an irrepressible desire, a passion for the dead others who are voiceless and who exist both inside and outside the threads of an articulated narrative, hidden and awaiting exhumation.”17 Clearly, by quoting this passage in relation to Poppie, Frank, and his daughter, I am consigning Frank and his daughter to a premature death of sorts. They have passed. The uneasy sense of judgment cannot be shaken. And yet the writing goes on, for it is all in obedience to the urge to remember and to remember in this form, writing. For Wyschogrod, narration of events produces a set of paradoxes. One of these is that the narration itself is an impossible task, an unrealizable ideal, because historical narratives cannot replicate the events they tell. Approximation is the most one can hope for. Of more direct concern to me is Wyschogrod’s admission of the paradox of the remembrance that takes the form of a narrative. She writes, “When the historian speaks in the name of the other, she preempts the speech of the other, whereas if she remains silent the other is consigned to invisibility.”18 What if what I have written is a misreading of Poppie? What if she did indeed desire in the Foucauldian sense? And what if she maintained a view of herself as a coloured woman in the act of passing? I cannot know the answer to these things. The subject was forbidden in any conversation. No questions could be asked. Her life played itself out as a fiction before which we were all to be enthralled, including her. And of Frank and his daughter, such questions cannot even approach the threshold of any conversation except in their absence. Of course, the other loss, perhaps the most unspeakable of all losses, is the gesture that sought to transcend time while also inhabiting it: the gesture of self-affirmation through the affirmation

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of alterity, the gesture of exuberant self-contamination, the gesture of abandoning identity. For, some of those miscegenated children who passed or who refused the need to pass, who were coloured by admission as well as assignation, those racial confusions were the product not of love but of violence. Sometimes, the modulation from double zero to zero one was not a fall but an ascent. NOTES

The epigraph is from Jacques Derrida, Cinders, trans. Ned Lukacher (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 53–54. 1. Taken from a pre-1990 Population Registration and Identification Guide, which accompanied all South African identity documents issued by the then South African secretary for the interior. I have chosen this version of the document because it relates to a period relevant to this essay. South-West Africa is now know as Namibia, having achieved independence from South Africa’s administration in 1990. German missionaries first explored the area in the nineteenth century, and it became a German protectorate in 1884. The League of Nations mandated it to South Africa in 1920, when it became known as SouthWest Africa. When the mandate ended in 1964, South Africa continued to administer the country until independence. It is also interesting to note that, while the Guide refers to “population groups,” the Population Registration Act No. 30 of 1950 declared that only four distinct racial categories existed: white, black, coloured, and Asian. Privileges were supposedly ranked according to racial category. So, for example, coloureds were not subject to the same controls on movement as blacks were. The category Asian included Indians who were primarily descended from groups brought from India as indentured labor between 1860 and 1911 to work in the cane fields in what is now coastal Kwazulu-Natal. The status of Chinese and Japanese peoples varied over the years, according to whether they had been born on mainland China, in Japan, or in South Africa. At one point, Japanese gained the peculiar privilege of being considered “honorary white.” Despite these “fine tunings” of groups within racial categories, the major racial division was, simply, white and “non-white.” Although I have chosen the lowercase for black to signify a broader political and nontribal usage, the capitalized Black was an official designation that was interchangeable with the term African or Bantu. The term white was synonymous with European. I am also using the term white to refer to apartheid’s official construct. In the wording of the 1950 Population Registration Act, a white person is considered one who “is in appearance obviously white—and not generally accepted as Coloured—or who is generally accepted as White—and is not obviously Non-White, provided that a person shall not be classified as a White person if one of his natural parents has been classified as a Coloured person or a Bantu.” The act classifies a Bantu as “a person who is, or is generally accepted as, a member of any aboriginal race or tribe of Africa,” while a coloured is “a person who is not a white person or a ‘Bantu.’” The Population Registration Act No. 30 was repealed by Population Registration Act Repeal No. 114 in 1991.

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2. I use these indeterminate temporal signifiers because identity documents are still in use in 2002. They are now issued by the Department of Home Affairs, which retains the racial categorization of the old apartheid regime for statistical reasons. 3. Phrases such as “Let’s get on with the future and forget the past” were uttered time and again in the media during the first high-energy months of the Victims Hearings in 1996. These phrases came from many but seemed to come most readily to the lips of industry and corporate leaders, for whom market stability was necessary, particularly if much-needed foreign investment could be secured. For them, the imperative was that the work of public mourning was to be pressed into serving the market’s need of an endless present in which to operate. 4. See Emmanuel Levinas: Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985); and Le temps et l’autre (Montpellier: Pata Morgana, 1979; originally published 1947), see 37, 39. 5. Walter Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1977), 166. 6. I have chosen to retain this spelling of the word to assert its difference from the term colored as used in the United States during the Jim Crow era, a term that has great historical burdens and whose utterance is a great cause for the remembered distress of what is in an improper name. 7. The Group Areas Act was passed by the Nationalist parliament in 1950 and effectively controlled the racial profiles of dedicated living areas. The result was the massive removal of peoples into designated “non-white” areas. Highprofile removals included the destruction of communities at District Six in Cape Town and Sophiatown in Johannesburg, as well as Cato Manor in Durban and South End in Port Elizabeth. Thus, only whites could live in certain places. Indians, coloureds, and black people lived in their segregated townships or settlements. The Group Areas Act was an extension of such earlier acts as the Black (Native) Administration Act No. 38 in 1927. This provided for the removal of any “non-white” individual or tribe from one place to another. After the 1952 Black (Native) Laws Amendment Act No. 54, all black men and women over the age of sixteen were required to carry passes that stated whether their presence in very specific urban areas had been approved. This act consolidated prior legislative moves to control the movement of black people. The act went through numerous amendments. The “Immorality Squad,” as it was called, was an infamous division within the South African Police Force, whose work was to investigate, track, and prosecute persons who committed the so-called immoral act of intimacy across official race lines. The first significant Immorality Act was passed in 1927, prohibiting “extra-marital intercourse” between whites and blacks. See Murial Horrell, Laws Affecting Race Relations in South Africa, 1948–1976 ( Johannesburg: Institute of Race Relations, 1978), 8. In 1950, it was extended to include in the prohibition all “non-whites”—black people, coloureds, and Asians. See John Dugard, Human Rights and the South African Legal Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 70. In 1957, the Immorality Act was replaced by the Sexual Offenses Act No. 23. The phrase “extra-marital intercourse” was replaced with “immoral or indecent act” (Dugard, Human Rights, 69). While these legal acts were directed against interracial “extra-marital” relations, prohi-

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bitions against acute interracial marriages were enforced through the Prohibition of Marriages Act No. 55 in 1949. The Immorality and Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Amendment Act No. 72 repealed this act and the Sexual Offenses Act in 1985. 8. See Frantz Fanon, “The Fact of Blackness,” in Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Pluto Press, 1986; originally published in French, 1952). 9. See Robert Ross, Beyond the Pale: Essays on the History of Colonial South Africa ( Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1993); Robert Shell, Children of Bondage: A Social History of the Slave Society at the Cape of Good Hope, 1652–1858 (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1994); Geoffrey Cronjé, ’n Tuiste vir die Nageslag—Diew Blywende Oplossing van Suid-Afrika se Rassevraagstuk ( Johannesburg: Publicite Handelsreklamediens [Edms.] Bpk, 1945). 10. Krotoa, also known as Eva, was a young Khoi woman taken up by the Cape Colony’s founding governor, van Riebeek, and his wife. Fluent in Dutch and Portuguese, she acted as a translator and go-between, securing trading and other relations between the locals and the incoming Dutch. She married a Danish surgeon but, after his death, attempted to return to her own people. Her return was described as that of a dog returning to its “own vomit,” and her death was seen by at least one commentator at the time as extinguishing “the fire of her lust.” In short, her story became a lesson in the supposed inevitability of “reversion” and the failure of a civilizing gesture on the part of the Dutch. See Richard Elphik, Khoikhoi and the Founding of White South Africa ( Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1985), see especially 106–10, 201–3. 11. For a detailed consideration of this figure and her relation to South African history, see Yvette Christiansë, “Sculpted into History: The Voortrekker Mother and the Gaze of the Invisible Servant,” New Literatures Review—Decolonising Bodies 30 (winter 1995): 1–16. For a discussion on the monument’s relationship to South African history, see Elizabeth Delmont, “The Voortrekker Monument: Monolith to Myth,” South African Historical Journal 29 (November 1993): 76–101. 12. The Voortrekker Monument: Official Guide (Pretoria: Board of the Voortrekker Monument, 1955), 34. 13. Jay Naidoo has interrogated this account. See Jay Naidoo, Tracking Down Historical Myths: Eight South African Cases ( Johannesburg: AD Donker [Pty] Ltd., 1989). 14. Geoffrey Cronjé, a professor of sociology and important influence on Afrikaner intellectualism of the 1940s and 1950s, articulated the Afrikaner position when he described miscegenation as leading to “physical disharmonies” as well as to “mental and moral disharmonies,” which would include “violent outbursts of temper, vanity and sexual instability.” Not only would this bloedvermenging (literally, a distortion of the blood) “bastardize” white people out of their racial identity, but they would also be lost to the nation. See Cronjé, ’n Tuiste vir die Nageslag, 42–95, but especially 10, 18–19, 20–21, 44–47, 55–59, 62, 107. 15. Quoted in Antjie Krog, Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa (New York: Times Books, 1999), 6. 16. Not only were all “non-white” laborers pressed into this logic, but lower-

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working-class whites were also required to make visible the benefits of whiteness while working just above non-white workers. 17. Edith Wyschogrod, An Ethics of Remembering: History, Heterology, and the Nameless Others (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 38. 18. Wyschogrod, An Ethics of Remembering, 38.

Alys Eve Weinbaum

Ways of Not Seeing (En)gendered Optics in Benjamin, Baudelaire, and Freud Often she looks away from him or she looks out of the picture towards the one who considers himself her true lover—the spectator-owner. john berger, Ways of Seeing

In The City (Die Stadt), a book of black-and-white woodcuts, Flemish artist Frans Masereel assembles a loose pictorial narrative about a man watching the life of a modern metropolis first from the distance, sitting on a hill from which he looks down on the labyrinth below, and then from the vantage point of a person wandering the city streets and entering the more intimate spaces (indoors and out) of the objects of his gaze.1 With this narrator the reader peruses railway stations, hospitals, museums, operas, amusement parks, brothels, steel mills, cafés, bars, and bedrooms and partakes in the excitement, chaos, and violence that is depicted as inextricable from the urban landscape. Of the one hundred prints in Masereel’s collection, two encapsulate the nexus of ideas about modernity, vision, masculinity, and loss that will be my focus in the following pages. The first is of a well-fed and well-dressed man peering into the window of a corset shop and dwelling on an array of headless and limbless female mannequins sporting curvaceous girdles and tightly laced supports. The second, placed at the end of the book, depicts another man (the narrator) collapsed in the arms of a huge nude woman, a figment of his dreams, who embraces him, effectively holding him together as he clasps his hands over his eyes in despair, his back to the city, his vision averted from the crowded urban landscape that lurks beyond his window. At its simplest, the dissolution of the male ego in the thick of the urban maelstrom, a state of psychic disintegration created by the forms of sensory overload that are germane to the chaotic urban environment, necessitates that woman be represented as man’s support. In the logic of Masereel’s images, the reorganization of the chaos of the visual field as a gendered field of vision facilitates the constitution of coherent masculine subjectivity 396

Frans Masereel, The City, 1925, woodblocks (courtesy of Random House; 䉷 2002 Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn)

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on the predictable and desirable side of the shop window. If man gains control over his psyche and establishes stable subjectivity through the mediation of his visual experience of his surroundings, however, there is a high price. For in order to establish himself as a subject who controls psychic, optical, and economic consumption, the male “spectator-owner” (to borrow a phrase from Berger) must shut his eyes to (or in the case of Masereel’s image, conceal them from) what he actually sees. That is, he must create a momentary loss of visual acuity and a phantasmatic claim that in fact the visual field is occupied by something much less shocking and far more reassuring than the modern metropolis: namely, woman. As will be apparent to many readers, the first major premise from which this essay departs—that the individual’s experience of industrializing urban centers creates the sensory foundation of modern life and necessitates the creation of a self-protective response to a perceived onslaught—is a wellworn thesis that has been explored by most of modernity’s current and past theorists.2 According to many scholars the periodization of modernism pivots on the identification of the disintegration of coherent subjectivity, on the representation of the individual’s disembodiment and/or destruction within visual and literary texts that are in turn read as symptomatic of rapid (and thus destabilizing) changes in social, economic, psychic, and spatial organization. The defamiliarization produced by modernization, urbanization, and industrialization is seen, quite literally, as physically and psychically shocking and is directly connected to perceptual dislocation and to the loss of sensory control. Insofar as their work explores modern subject constitution, the thinkers on whom I focus in the following pages may be read within this rubric. And yet, rather than arguing that Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, and Sigmund Freud recorded the urban drama that they witnessed and wrote within, I read their texts as more than symptomatic, as actively involved in the production of modernity as visually destabilizing and, more specifically, in the production of the loss of visual control as a principal index of gender identity. For, not only did all three create texts that testify to visual crisis; each located the loss of visual acuity as a gendered phenomenon that can be regarded as central to the articulation of modernism.3 In addition to the first premise from which this essay takes off, there is also a second—that which has been so eloquently developed by feminist film theorists and feminist psychoanalytic scholars who have persistently argued that the gaze is a necessarily gendered psychic structure. Even though there have been a number of revisions of the initial formulation that “the gaze is male” and a myriad of questions asked about woman’s role in the scopic economy, the alternative possibility of a female gaze, and where race fits within this paradigm, there is nonetheless something of a scholarly consensus that the objectification of woman in the male field of

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vision has often served as the ground for securing coherent masculinity. As the now familiar argument goes, when woman is transformed into a fetish object she guarantees the viewer’s control over the visual field, his sense of stable subjectivity in a potential moment of crisis.4 In the argument that follows I do not dispute the idea that among a variety of forms of the gaze there is a hegemonic male gaze that is both fetishizing and objectifying. Rather, I modify this formulation and suggest that the male gaze is a construct best characterized not so much by control, mastery, or prowess as by the momentary loss of all three.5 Indeed, far from situating the male gaze as a transhistorical and universal psychic truth, I locate it as a historically specific construct whose genealogy of production can be traced in the work of several of modernity’s central theorists. I. CITY OF WOMEN

In “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” the only section of Benjamin’s much larger project on the nineteenth-century French poet that was published during his lifetime, he argues that shock (der Chock) characterizes the poet’s experience of the city in which he works and lives.6 As he persistently asserts, the single most important subject in Baudelaire’s writings, both his source and context, is the metropolitan mass that inhabits the city: “the mass was the agitated veil; through [which] Baudelaire saw Paris.”7 Or again, Benjamin attests, “Of all the experiences which made his life what it was, Baudelaire singled out his having been jostled by the crowd as the [most] decisive, unique experience.”8 In these formulations and others like them, Baudelaire is cast as a participant observer whose perception of urban street life is the source of his textual practice. This experience is neither neutral nor passive, but it is Baudelaire’s principal source of agitation; as characterized by Benjamin, it is an experience that at times even “shocked” the poet. As Baudelaire writes: “Lost in this mean world, jostled by the crowd, I am like a weary man whose eye, looking backwards, into the depth of the years, sees nothing but disillusion and bitterness, and before him nothing but a tempest. . . .”9 In search of a framework within which to understand how Baudelaire parried the visual shocks that emanated from the city through which he wandered and in which he worked, Benjamin considers several previous theories about the modern subject’s management of external stimuli, or as he variously expresses it, shock neutralization, absorption, acceptance, or cushioning. Benjamin’s search is organized chronologically. He begins by examining Bergson’s concept of the durée, the spontaneous after-image produced by external stimulus, which he argues, “indirectly furnishes a clue to the experience which presented itself to Baudelaire’s eye.”10 Arguing that the notion is ultimately ahistorical in its erasure of the situation out of which

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it evolved, “the inhospitable, blinding age of big-scale industrialism,”11 Benjamin attempts to hold on to the basic idea and simultaneously contextualizes its emergence. In so doing he moves on to Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. In delineating the difference between the mémoire volontaire and involontaire, Benjamin argues that Proust reworked Bergson’s historically inattentive philosophy. The mémoire involontaire, unlike the durée, reveals the ways in which memories unwittingly “bear the marks of the situations that gave rise to [them and become] part of the inventory of the individual.”12 However, as useful as it may be in showing how memory is grounded in sensory experience, the Proustian model fails to address the mechanism by which memories are transformed into representations of past experience such as poetry. In the end, Benjamin remains dissatisfied until he engages Freud. In reading Proust through the lens of Freud’s analysis of memory work elaborated in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” he at last locates a sufficiently historical schema. What he takes from the Freudian text is twofold: on the one hand, he assimilates Freud’s idea that “consciousness comes into being at the site of a memory trace”;13 on the other, he adopts and then adapts Freud’s realization that the psychical system’s primary function is the conversion of unconscious phenomena into conscious experience. Benjamin quotes Freud thus: “ ‘It would be the special characteristic of consciousness that, unlike what happens in all other psychical systems, the excitatory process does not leave behind a permanent change in its elements, but expires, as it were, in the phenomenon of becoming conscious.’ ”14 Put simply, in Freud’s theory consciousness serves memory by making conscious those stimuli unconsciously apprehended—stimuli such as those produced by the city and unconsciously received by the poet as visual shocks. Immediately translating what he had gleaned from Freud back into Proustian terms, Benjamin argues that “this means that only what has not been experienced explicitly and consciously . . . can become a component of the mémoire involontaire.”15 Remapping the distinction between reception and protection that he found embodied in Proust’s concepts of the mémoire involontaire and volontaire accordingly, Benjamin attaches his own new terminology to the now revised (though not discarded) Proustian ideas. The concepts described under the aegis of Erlebnis and Erfahrung do not map precisely onto Proust’s two forms of memory, but the connections are nonetheless significant. The mémoire involontaire, like the operation expressed by the term Erfahrung, renders “the excessive energies at work in the external world” into conscious experiences through a process that lies at the root of creativity. This amounts to the management of experiences of shock that are already in the unconscious, through their conscious rearticulation as memories.

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Shock management or “shock neutralization” (Reizschutz) constitutes the successful transformation of threats imposed by “external energies” that are stored unconsciously into conscious experiences. As Benjamin notes, “The more readily consciousness registers these shocks, the less likely are they to have a traumatic effect.”16 By contrast, conscious remembering, the active recollection of the past that is the province of the mémoire volontaire, is devoid of the creative power specific to the mémoire involontaire and is thus merely a kind of narrative reconstruction that does not necessitate the same type of complex psychic work. The term Erlebnis characterizes these less weighty experiences, those that can be recalled, renarrated, and thus (re)presented at will. As Benjamin clarifies, perception experiences that are lived through but not made conscious (Erlebnis) are distinct from those that acquire the weight of experience in becoming conscious (Erfahrung). Though these distinctions are so complicated they fray at the edges, they nonetheless constitute the framework that Benjamin mobilizes in order to theorize a mechanism for grappling with the experience of sensory onslaught within Baudelaire’s poetry. Because Baudelaire made it his business to counter the shocks of the city, his writing testifies to the successful conversion of unconsciously apprehended visual stimuli into conscious experiences that when recollected by the poet provide the foundation for artistic production. For this reason, Baudelaire’s work stands as proof of the fact that “lyric poetry can have as its basis an experience for which the shock experience has become the norm . . . [and] cannot merely be categorized as historical, like anyone else’s”; rather, Baudelaire’s poetry actually “intended to be [historical] and understood itself as such.”17 Honing this thesis as finely as possible, Benjamin concludes that in giving Erlebnis, everyday lived experiences, the weight of Erfahrung, Baudelaire poetically rendered what would otherwise have remained unconscious, by putting it in the world for all to read. In Benjamin’s recasting, Freud’s universalizing and transhistorical ideas about memory and repression emerge reconfigured, as expressive of the processes of urbanization and modernization that can be apprehended in Baudelaire’s work as both catalyst and subject. Although the shock experience lies at the very center of Baudelaire’s writing, Benjamin recognizes that it is rarely present in Baudelaire’s texts but is instead figured by the metropolitan masses, who are themselves “imprinted on [Baudelaire’s] creativity as a hidden figure.”18 Describing this textual masking, Benjamin observes that the masses “had become so much a part of Baudelaire that it is rare to find a description of them in his works. . . . His most important subjects are hardly ever encountered in descriptive form.”19 Or again, he writes, “It is futile to search in [Baudelaire] for any . . . portrayals of the city. . . . Baudelaire describes neither the Parisians nor their city. Foregoing such descriptions enables him to invoke the one in

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the form of the other. His crowd is always the crowd of a big city, his Paris is invariably overpopulated . . . [such that] the secret presence of the crowd is demonstrated almost everywhere.”20 Initially Benjamin makes the paradoxical claim that Baudelaire represents the crowd’s presence as an absence. He suggests that this is one of the consequences of the failure of the mémoire involontaire to protect against stimuli. Rather than the crowd—“the people in the street”21—being present, Benjamin avers, its effect is merely felt in the form of a memory trace that is elliptically represented in Baudelaire’s depictions of the city. This formulation, however, does not suffice. As Benjamin makes clear, it is precisely on account of Baudelaire’s refusal to name “the crowd in either word or phrase”22 that it becomes imperative to ask how the psychic processes of shock management become manifest in his writings and in turn how they can be identified. Through analysis of “À une passante,” the only one of Baudelaire’s poems that Benjamin reproduces in its entirety, Benjamin proffers several important observations by way of a solution to the paradox. In this sonnet Baudelaire “supplies the figure of shock, indeed of catastrophe,” but not as the crowd itself. Instead, the figure of catastrophe appears in the form of a departing woman, a woman who walks the street in clothes of mourning and who captivates the poet. I follow Benjamin in citing the poem in full before considering his analysis of it: La rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait. Longue, mince, en grand deuil, douleur majestueuse, Une femme passa, d’une main fastueuse Soulevant, balançant le feston et l’ourlet; Agile et noble, avec sa jambe de statue. Moi, je buvais, crispé comme un extravagant, Dans son Oeil, ciel livide où germe l’ouragan, La douceur qui fascine et le plaisir qui tue. Un éclair . . . puis la nuit!—Fugitive beauté Dont le regard m’a fait soudainement renaître, Ne te verrai-je plus que dans l’éternité? Ailleurs, bien loin d’ici! Trop tard! Jamais peut-être! Car j’ignore où tu fuis, tu ne sais où je vais, O toi que j’eusse aimée, ô toi qui le savais! The deafening street was screaming all around me. Tall, slender, in deep mourning, majestic grief, A woman made her way, with fastidious hand Raising and swaying festoon and embroidered hem; Agile and noble, with her statue’s limbs. And there was I, who drank, contorted like a madman,

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Within her eyes, that livid sky where hurricane is born, The softness that fascinates and the pleasure that kills. A flash . . . then night!—O fleeting beauty Whose look all of a sudden gave me new birth, Shall I see you again only in eternity? Far, far from here! Too late! Or maybe, never! For I know not where you flee, you know not where I go, O you I would have loved, O you who knew it too!23

Though the bustling street is shocking, “in a widow’s veil, mysteriously and mutely borne along by the crowd, an unknown woman comes into the poet’s field of vision.” “Far from experiencing the crowd as an opposed, antagonistic element,” the sonnet communicates that “this very crowd brings the city dweller the figure that fascinates.”24 The crowd whisks the woman clad in fashionable mourning attire into the poet’s purview, facilitating “the delight of the urban poet . . . not at first sight, but at last sight,” as it is the woman’s fleeting presence that ultimately makes his “body contract in a sexual tremor” (crispé comme un extravagant).25 In “À une passante,” as the street screams around the poet, through fixation of his gaze on the woman, he is able to drown out the crowd’s deafening roar. The visual shock that is produced by the crowd on “first sight” is subsequently gendered as female on “last sight,” and it is precisely though its mediation— in this case, quite explicitly, its personification in woman—that it is managed and then made pleasurable.26 As Benjamin concludes, Baudelaire’s sonnet “reveal[s] the stigmata which life in a metropolis inflicts,” but not through representation of the metropolis. Rather it is through alteration of the visual field (“last sight”) that the poet is able to come to terms with what he sees on “first sight.” In transforming the crowd into an adorned woman whose presence fills his visual field, the poet converts city shock into personal pleasure; potentially this is a “pleasure that kills,” but the risk is worth taking, since this alteration of “the poet’s field of vision” guarantees him “new birth.” Though Benjamin does not extensively engage Baudelaire’s essay on the nineteenth-century French artist Constantin Guys, it is to it that his analysis of “À une passante” leads. In legislating how Guys should depict what he sees on the Paris streets, Baudelaire argues that Guys maintains his title as exemplary artist of modernity only by representing woman in his visual field. In the section of Baudelaire’s essay entitled “Woman,” he treats Guys’s representation of female forms in an idealized, if denigrated, manner; in another section, “In Praise of Cosmetics,” he expounds on Guys’s representations of the artifice intimately tied to woman’s being; and in a third section, “On Women and Prostitutes,” Baudelaire discusses Guys’s sketches of so-called real women (note the plural) who are at least marginally en-

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gaged in the economic arena of exchange. Taken together these three sections constitute an argument about the subjugation of the ideal woman to processes of modernization, processes that transform the singular into the plural, such that the idealized woman reemerges as a collective presence on the Paris streets. As if in counterpoint to the praise bestowed on Guys’s portraits of men, misogyny pervades Baudelaire’s description of Guys’s depictions of women, who are invariably “embellished with all the rites of artifice” and characterized as “creature[s]” who are “perhaps only incomprehensible because [they have] nothing to communicate.”27 Devoid of intellectual ability, women are little more than the artist’s apprehension of them, visual mediums of exchange among men. Baudelaire formulates these ideas in unequivocal terms: it is adorned women “who exist very much more for the pleasure of the observer than for their own,” who are the beings “for whom and through whom fortunes are made and unmade; for whom, but above all through whom, artists and poets create their most exquisite jewels.”28 In the eyes of both Guys (the artist) and Baudelaire (the poet), women are a means to an end, aesthetic objects whose visual circulation enables artistic production. Though stark, Baudelaire’s contempt for women is both complex and contradictory. Embedded in his praise of Guys’s depictions is the idea that woman’s worth, her value—nothing less than the essence of her being— emerges at the exact moment that she is flattened out and made contentless; for when rendered as a surface whose outside subsumes her inside, woman becomes an invaluable asset. “Everything that adorns woman,” Baudelaire writes, “everything that serves to show off her beauty [becomes] a part of herself” (30); she is never worth more than when she becomes one with her gauzes and muslins, when she moves in “general harmony” with the vast “iridescent clouds of stuff in which she envelopes herself.”29 Woman is a commodity who harbors a peculiar secret about the constellation of social relationships in which she is ensnared. She connects to the world through her adornment and becomes identifiable as a commodity. In other words, by equating womanhood with surface, Baudelaire simultaneously renders femininity contentless and meaningful: woman’s true being emerges at the exact moment that she becomes inseparable from the costume with which her body and being together form an “indivisible unity.”30 When Baudelaire turns his attention to Guys’s sketches of working women, he further conflates surface and substance. Whereas the idealized woman (singular) is said to be aesthetically pleasing by nature, laboring women actively produce themselves as one-dimensionally (and thus as beautifully) as possible. As Baudelaire insists, the working woman labors to transform her substance into surface; and it is Guys’s greatest achievement

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to have realized in his representations of prostitutes, courtesans, actresses, and dancers that these “object[s] of public pleasure” are workers remunerated for becoming one with their adornment,31 for standing as testimony to the forms of beauty that can be bought and contrived. In contrast with the idealized woman who is born and bred into her role as superficial bauble, the working woman’s value lies in her ability to market herself as a commodity, for it is her job to transform her body into a living showcase displaying the economic relations of production and exchange.32 Among the adorned working women whom Baudelaire discusses, prostitutes predictably figure as the extreme example of the adequation of femininity, surface, and commodification. As Benjamin notes, the prostitute is “saleswoman and wares in one.”33 In contrast with the idealized woman, prostitutes inhabit the city streets and the world of financial transactions. “The most elaborately dressed and embellished by all the rites of artifice,” prostitutes alone possess the form of “ ‘professional’ beauty” that indexes not only their gender but also their trade.34 If women’s sartorial display renders them commodities who stud the urban landscape of which they are a part, the question remains, Why does Baudelaire so adamantly demand that Guys traffic in the proliferation of such images?35 II. WAYS OF NOT SEEING

In Freud’s writings, especially those that focus on the subject’s construction of sexual and gender identity, control over the field of vision emerges as central to subjectification in a manner that is strikingly similar to that discussed above. In the same way that Freud’s theory of shock management is historicized through dialogue with Benjamin’s and Baudelaire’s texts, so too is his theory of the relationship between visual perception and identity formation. Feminist theorists, among others, have offered insight into this process by arguing that Freud invariably links the establishment of gender identity to questions of the organization of the visual field. As their argument goes, visual stimuli, particularly the nude female body, challenge the viewer’s ability to comprehend the “truth” about sexual difference by shocking the viewer out of his expectations and thus destabilizing his ability to establish a coherent gender identity grounded in so-called visual facts. When the subject loses the ability to apprehend the visual field accurately, the link between visualization and cognition is rendered tenuous, and the subject’s ability to know, uncertain.36 In Freud’s essays “The Infantile Genital Organization” (1923), “The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex” (1924), and “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes” (1925), this line of argument is forcefully elaborated. All three works repeatedly establish a coincidence between a disturbance in the visual field and the problem of

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the subject’s constitution of his masculinity. The libidinal sexual organization of the male child, Freud argues, pivots on his conviction that “all other living beings, humans and animals [alike] possess a genital like his” and on his fascination with his own member.37 However, even though the little boy assumes that everyone has a penis and “looks for an organ analogous to his everywhere,” in the course of his researches he inevitably discovers that his assumptions are false. As Freud informs readers, it is “an accidental sight of the genitals of a little sister or playmate . . . that provides the occasion for this discovery,” one that in “unusually intelligent children” has already been made through “the observation of girls urinating.”38 Though the boy first reacts to the revelation of female lack by repeating his “observations so as to obtain enlightenment,” once he confirms what he has first seen, he engages in a process of retroactive disavowal. The “lack of a penis is regarded as a result of castration,” and although the boy has procured evidence to the contrary, he constructs his first vision so that he can assert that he in fact does “see a penis, all the same.” In the formulation that is the most pivotal for my argument, Freud observes that the boy “gloss[es] over the contradiction between observation and preconception by telling [himself ] that the [little girl’s] penis is still small and will grow bigger presently,” and thus effectively mediates his visual experience by altering it so that he may reasonably believe that what he has seen matches what he thinks he ought to have.39 Although the visualization of sexual difference is equally important for the little girl, her process of subject formation is unique. As Freud infamously asserts, when the little girl makes a visual comparison between her body and that of “a playfellow of the other sex, she perceives that she has ‘come off badly’ and feels this as a wrong done to her and as a ground for inferiority.” Rather than following the boy in disavowing what she has seen, however, the little girl “accepts [her] castration as an accomplished fact.”40 Giving form to the girl’s mode of perception, Freud states that on seeing the boy’s penis, the “little girl . . . makes her judgment and her decision in a flash. She has seen it and knows that she is without it and wants to have it.”41 Whereas the girl possesses an instantaneous, and thus epistemologically stable, “flash” of visual recognition, the boy negotiates what he perceives by conflating primary and secondary processes and retroactively constructing an initial visual experience in order to secure a compensation or remedy. Moses and Monotheism, one of Freud’s later so-called social texts, is not often considered in relation to his earlier work on infantile sexuality, and yet it is here that Freud presents the most historically compelling analogy for the psychic mechanism that children develop for dealing with the visual shocks encountered early in life. He writes, “The strongest compulsive influence arises from impressions which impinge upon a child at a time when we would have to regard his psychical apparatus as not yet completely re-

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ceptive. The fact itself cannot be doubted; but it is so puzzling that we may make it more comprehensible by comparing it with a photographic exposure which can be developed after any interval of time and transformed into a picture.”42 Presumably, the photographic development process presents itself as an explanatory tool, because it allows Freud to explain the time elapsed between the impression first made on the child and this child’s transformation of it into a conscious image (or “picture”). Even more significantly, Freud’s reference to photography historically locates his theory. At the same time that Freud alludes to an analogical relationship between the male psyche and the camera, he also uses the idea of photography to create a historically specific structural relationship between the visualization of shocking experiences and the new technology.43 Freud not only equates the child and camera, his eye with the camera lens, but also the boy’s psychical method for processing what he has perceived and those photographic processes that transform the external world into pictures. If shock produces a negative image imprinted on the child’s mind’s eye that is later transformed into a picture, this begs a question: For what is the content or subject of the picture developed from this negative? Following the essays on infantile sexuality, readers might be inclined to imagine these photographs as representations of woman’s lack, of the female body. And yet, it is precisely this expectation that is subverted in Moses and Monotheism. Swiftly and effortlessly digressing from discussion of the photographic process to invocation of an author with whom he, Baudelaire, and Benjamin were all equally enamored, Freud brings E. T. A. Hoffmann into his argument.44 Writing of the transformation of early visual impressions into images of the early experiences of life, Freud attests that he is “glad to point out that this uncomfortable discovery of [his] has been anticipated by an imaginative writer, with the boldness that is permitted to poets”; for Hoffmann reveals in his memoir that he “used to trace back the wealth of figures that put themselves at his disposal for his creative writing to the changing images and impressions which he had experienced during a journey of some weeks in a post-chaise while he was still an infant at his mother’s breast.”45 A post chaise, a four-wheel horse-drawn carriage common in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, conveyed mail and passengers between cities. In other words, Freud is imagining (somewhat anachronistically) that the images that would have been developed from the impressions (or “negatives”) stored by Hoffmann in infancy are those depicting his travels among the epicenters of the Prussian Empire.46 In bringing Hoffmann into his analysis, Freud takes an unexpected turn, challenging readers who assume that the first impressions of which he is writing are of the female body. For according to his reading of Hoffmann, these first impressions emanate from much larger surrounds: the urbanizing landscape and densely populated streets. In bringing Hoffmann into his

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analysis, Freud casts the female body and the urban populations bustling outside the carriage window as metonyms for each other, just as they are in Benjamin’s analysis of Baudelaire’s shock-induced poetry and prose. Indeed, the little boy’s “first sight” of female genitalia as discussed by Freud is like the poet’s “first sight” of the crowded urban street as discussed by Benjamin: it is faulty. Like the poet’s initial vision, the boy’s precipitates another look, a last look that recuperates visual mastery by altering his understanding of his visual experience. Though my own reading of Hoffmann does not coincide with Benjamin’s reading of the relationship between Baudelaire’s description of spectatorship and Hoffmann’s (as I will explain shortly), I am fascinated by the fact that Benjamin was sufficiently intrigued by the connection between the two figures to spend several pages comparing the poet’s observations of the city with those articulated by a fictional spectator created by Hoffmann. Immediately after concluding his discussion of Baudelaire’s “À une passante,” Benjamin launches into an analysis of two stories, “The Man of the Crowd,” a tale by Edgar Allan Poe (which Baudelaire had translated and analyzed), and a second piece that antedates Poe’s work, “My Cousin’s Corner Window,” a short story by Hoffmann. In Benjamin’s appraisal, Poe’s tale, set in London, is “a classic example among older versions of the motif of the crowd.” In his depiction of a convalescent man who watches the masses surging past in the street outside the window of the café in which he is seated, Poe has captured those forces that are “capable of exerting both a subtle and a profound effect upon artistic production.” Poe’s “manner of presentation,” Benjamin clarifies, “cannot be called realism” but is more akin to Baudelaire’s depictions of the “big-city crowds.”47 In contrast with Benjamin’s laudatory reviews of Poe’s and Baudelaire’s portraits of modern spectators, he deems Hoffmann’s inadequate. Hoffmann’s spectator is a man whose time has passed, a man who does not join in the rush but instead “demand[s] elbow room” and remains stubbornly “unwilling to forgo the life of . . . leisure.” As Benjamin explains, Hoffmann’s spectator watches the crowd through opera glasses, maintains a distance, and focuses not on surging masses but rather on “individual genre scenes.” Consequently, Hoffmann has not really captured the essence of the spectator-crowd relation. And yet, perhaps Benjamin has misread Hoffmann. Although Hoffmann’s paralyzed spectator is unable to step out into the scene he witnesses, he, like the poet in “À une passante,” claims he has mastered “the principle art of seeing.” Like the poet, this spectator parries the shocks produced by the visual field by transforming it into a gendered field of vision. The city street does not penetrate his psyche and invoke “fear, revulsion, and horror” (as it does for Poe’s spectator), but rather is converted into pleasure. As Benjamin points out, this spectator does not focus on “the masses as such,” on the overwhelming street scene by which

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his eye is arrested on “first sight”; rather, he mitigates his loss of visual mastery by turning his attention to a series of second scenes, those that Benjamin (following Hoffmann) describes as “dominated by women.”48 Though Benjamin attempts to differentiate Baudelaire’s and Hoffmann’s understandings of how the man of the crowd parries the shock of experiencing it, he reveals more of a similarity in their understandings of (en)gendered optics than he intends. In light of Benjamin’s own analysis of Baudelaire, it is no accident that the members of the crowd on whom Hoffmann’s spectator fixates are female. Within the framework that Benjamin constructs, the observer brings gender into his field of vision in response to his loss of visual control. At its simplest, in Hoffmann’s story, as in Freud’s theory, the male viewer must take a second look at what he sees. In anachronistically linking Hoffmann’s mode of perception to the mode of perception that he likens to photography, Freud situates Hoffmann as an artist who masters the loss of visual objectivity by converting shock into pleasure. And yet if this is so, why does Freud insist on characterizing the analogy that he creates between Hoffmann’s “poetic” transformation of shock and the camera’s transformation of the visual field as an “uncomfortable discovery”? Evidently the figure of the photographic mechanism is more vexed and discomforting for Freud than it initially appears. Indeed, the idea that the unconscious functions like a camera is “uncomfortable” precisely because there is something constitutively disturbing about the type of vision encapsulated in the photographic technology. In order to explore this dissonance, I once again turn to Benjamin. His writings on Baudelaire’s reactions to the unsettling nature of photography provide intriguing answers to the historical questions begged by the Freudian text. In examining the “uncomfortable” shifts in perception that attend the advent of the reproducible image, these writings explain the psychic repercussions of the image that is created not through the collaboration of the practiced hand and eye but rather with one swift movement, in nothing more than a flash.49 III. MASCULINITY IN THE AGE OF MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION

In his most often read piece, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin argues that “during the long period of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence.”50 Focusing on the array of technological developments that have made images and art reproducible, he develops a now familiar materialist argument about the determination of human perception not “only by nature but by historical circumstance,” by changes in the mode of production, working conditions, and in the machinery or technology with which workers create goods.51 Although Benjamin discusses the transfor-

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mations (or what he sometimes calls crises) in perception that were catalyzed by the printing press, lithography, and the first moving images, he reserves a privileged place for the changes wrought by photography: “Photography freed the hand of the most important artistic functions which henceforth devolved only upon the eye looking into the lens. Since the eye perceives more swiftly than the hand can draw, the process of pictorial reproduction was accelerated so enormously that it could keep pace with speech.”52 With the advent of photography, the hand became obsolete, painting ceased to be the preeminent form of mimetic representation, and the nature of mimesis was itself irrevocably altered. Whereas artists working to coordinate hand and eye invariably mediate the visual field in transforming external reality into its representation, photographers capture images on first glance (in “a flash”), representing reality without mediation. At the moment the camera’s shutter closes, the image’s existence—as it was at the moment it was arrested—begins. In fact, photographic imaging is so immediate that Benjamin compares the snap of the camera’s shutter to the opening of the mouth in the act of speech. In the “Work of Art” essay as in others, the advent of the photographic image is directly linked to the elimination of what Benjamin has famously labeled the aura. The photographic technique of reproduction “detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition” and abolishes “the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be,” between the subject and the object of the gaze.53 If the advent of the photograph makes the auratic distance that previously characterized artistic perception impossible by stripping the object bare, it also adds something to the image. By cutting more deeply into reality than the painting can, the photograph reveals “secrets” of the object that are missing from the kinds of idealized representations created by the painter’s brush and inspired by the world as witnessed by the naked eye. Reiterating and at the same time revising the analogy drawn by Freud between psychic and photographic mechanisms, Benjamin writes that “the camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.”54 A few years earlier in the less familiar essay “A Small History of Photography,” Benjamin expresses his thoughts more clearly still: No matter how artful the photographer, no matter how carefully posed his subject, the beholder feels an irresistible urge to search . . . a picture for the tiny spark of contingency, of the Here and Now, with which reality has so to speak seared the subject, to find the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment the future subsists so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it. For it is another nature that speaks to the camera than to the eye: other in the sense that a space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the unconscious. . . . Photog-

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raphy . . . reveals the secret. It is through photography that we first discover the existence of [the] optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis.55

Psychoanalysis and photography both possess the ability to cut beneath the appearance of things, to represent things as they are rather than as the subject imagines or desires them to be. Whereas Freud likens the photographic process to the psychic one, Benjamin views the psychoanalytic process as analogous to the photographic one. In contrast with Freud, who uses photography to explain the work of the psyche when confronted by the shocking stimuli emanating from the external world, Benjamin invokes psychoanalysis to explain the shattering of the aura that accompanies the advent of mechanical reproduction. As Benjamin acknowledges, this shattering has both psychic and material repercussions, for the photograph vacates the image of the magical and mystical aspect of the art object and simultaneously forces an intensely proximate scopic posture on the viewing subject. Though Benjamin had not completed his essay on Baudelaire at the time he first formulated these thoughts on photography, he foreshadows the overlap between the two projects by ending “A Small History” with a discussion of Baudelaire’s reaction to photographs. Such images, he notes, produce a “violent reaction” in the poet, because photography exerts a force equal in magnitude to the degree to which the new technology encroaches on the poet’s mode of perception.56 Emphasizing this point and relating what is at stake, Benjamin cites Baudelaire’s lament about the emergence of the first photographs in millennial tones: In these sorry days a new industry has arisen that has done not a little to strengthen the asinine belief . . . that art is and can be nothing more than the accurate reflection of nature. . . . A vengeful god has hearkened to the voice of this multitude. Daguerre is his Messiah. . . . If photography is permitted to supplement some of art’s functions, they will forthwith be usurped and corrupted by it.57

These famous lines, excerpted from Baudelaire’s review of the 1859 Paris Salon, were written in reaction to the first such exhibition in which photographic images were included alongside painted, drawn, sculpted, and sketched works. In his later essay on Baudelaire, Benjamin’s analysis of these sentiments crystallizes in his conclusion that for Baudelaire “there was something profoundly unnerving and terrifying about daguerreotypy,” for “the fascination it exerted [was at once] ‘startling and cruel.’ ”58 Though the Baudelairean idea of photography as a “purely objective transcript of reality,” a “message without a code,” or as Roland Barthes would later express it, an “analogon of the world,” no longer has much currency in an age savvy to the manipulation of so-called reality by photo-

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graphic processes, in the period in which Baudelaire wrote, photographs were being widely used to augment perception and to capture the “secrets” of life that were obscured from view in fast-paced, crowded, and rapidly industrializing cities.59 As Benjamin notes, by the 1840s portrait artists had largely given up their trade, because photographs had replaced portraiture as the dominant mode of representation. Following on the heels of this change, photographs were commonly summoned as evidence of individual identity by police, courts, medical practitioners, and psychiatrists—by institutions and individuals who keep archives documenting faces and features, illnesses and misdemeanors, deviancies and crimes, for use in the classification, division, and control of the population.60 In such a context, Baudelaire’s strong feelings about photography can be read as a reaction to the popular idea that photographs were perfected versions of reality, absolute indexes of what could be seen. And at least on the manifest level, this is the explanation for Baudelaire’s response that Benjamin provides. In a situation in which photographers wielding cameras were extolled as the creators of the most “accurate reflection[s] of nature,” the definition of realist art to which Baudelaire subscribed was seriously challenged. As exciting as it was for people to grab hold of their likenesses at close range, Baudelaire could see nothing in this democratization of the image other than a crisis in artistic perception. In explanation of Baudelaire’s quandary, Benjamin observes that Baudelaire . . . must have sensed, though he certainly did not see through them, the connections [between the ascendance of artistic realism and the advent of photography] of which we have spoken. His willingness always to grant the modern its place and, especially in art, to assign it its specific function also determined his attitude toward photography. Whenever he felt it as a threat, he tried to put it down to its “mistaken development”; yet he admitted that these were promoted by “the stupidity of the broad masses [who] . . . demanded an ideal that would conform to their aspirations and the nature of their temperament.”61

The incursion made by photography, the “threat” it posed to Baudelaire, was the mass disruption of the “region of the intangible,” the region of the “imaginative,” the region of the mind where the mediation processes that Baudelaire viewed as so central to true artistic genius took place.62 Baudelaire’s essay on Guys meticulously examines the form of “visual (re)vision” (as opposed to immediate apprehension) that Baudelaire idealized. Precisely because Guys mediated what he saw, Baudelaire celebrates him as the quintessential artist of modernity. Modernity—characterized by “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable”63—is representable only by a person who can capture these transient qualities. In contrast with a true artist such

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as Guys, the photographer is a mere copycat, a corrupter of art who paralyzes reality in a flash, recording a singular image in the instantaneous click of the camera’s shutter. As Benjamin explains, Baudelaire recognized that “the perpetual readiness of volitional, discursive memory, encouraged by the technique of mechanical reproduction, reduce[d] . . . the scope for the play of imagination,” such that viewers entered into new relationships with the objects of their gaze.64 Though it is tempting to conclude, on the basis of these observations, that Baudelaire’s ideas about photography were grounded solely in a philosophy of aesthetics, this was not the case. As the language Benjamin uses to distinguish between artistic and photographic modes of perception indicates, something more interesting is also at work. According to Benjamin, Baudelaire intuited photography’s power to challenge and reshape not only the definition of realist art but also the ontological and epistemological orientation of the male viewer set on producing a mediated image of the visual scene first apprehended but henceforth lost. As Benjamin puts it, Baudelaire “indicated the price for which the sensation of the modern age may be had: the disintegration of the aura in the experience of shock.”65 Like Freud after him, Baudelaire understood that the photographic image unsettled because it prophesied, as it embodied, a new way of seeing. The camera’s immediate apprehension of the visual field inaugurated a “startling” new world in a flash, a “cruel” world in which unmediated perception burst onto the scene, only to luxuriate in its own dominance. Like the little girl’s vision, photographic vision left no room for transformation or disavowal of what had been seen on “first sight,” be it the “castrated” female body or the whirling flow of human traffic moving through buzzing streets. In short, photography was “uncomfortable” as an analog of the psyche, and photographs repulsive, because the existence of the technology exposed as it challenged the loss of visual control and the collapse of primary and secondary processes that together enabled the compensatory transformation of the field of vision. Throughout “The Painter of Modern Life,” Baudelaire searches for an adequate spectral identity for Guys. In a series of attempts to find a good fit he equates Guys with an array of figures (child, convalescent, flâneur, and dandy) each of whom possesses a distinct form of perception. Often Baudelaire rescinds a few pages later the identity he has recently settled on, while at other times the plethora of identities eloquently testifies to Baudelaire’s struggle to locate a satisfactory scopic modality. In discussing the dandy and flâneur, for example, he insists that Guys is neither, because visual mediation is, for different reasons, impossible for each. While the dandy is far too insensitive and distanced from the objects of his gaze to transform them, the flâneur, immersed in the “electrical field of the crowd” and dissolving into a “non-I,” is conversely too close. As Baudelaire explains,

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Guys was dominated by an insatiable passion for seeing and feeling that rendered him too involved in the crowd to remain at the dandy’s dignified distance; at the same time he was too engaged in manufacturing the painter’s critical distance to be a flâneur, the man who characteristically mingles with, although he never deigns to become one with, the crowd. It would seem that for Baudelaire, mastery of “the principles of the art of seeing” (to return to Hoffmann’s phrase) is tantamount to maintenance of an appropriate distance from the object of the gaze, a distance that is modeled on that possessed by the convalescent and the child.66 Each perceives the world in a state of newness, ecstatically, with a sense of the wonder of seeing as if for the first time. Using as his example the spectator already encountered in Edgar Allan Poe’s story, Baudelaire explains that Poe’s protagonist is as pleasurably absorbed in watching the crowd as a child would be: “But lately returned from the valley of the shadow of death . . . [this man] rapturously breath[es] in all the odours and essences of life. . . .”67 If we imagine “an artist who was always, spiritually, in the condition of [Poe’s] convalescent . . . [we] will have the key to the nature of Monsieur G.”68 Asking readers to view convalescence as a return to the dangerously debilitating intoxication of childhood, Baudelaire instructs: Let us go back, if we can, by a retrospective effort of the imagination, towards our most youthful, our earliest, impressions, and we will recognize that they had a strange kinship with those brightly colored impressions which we were later to receive in the aftermath of a physical illness. . . . The child sees everything in a state of newness, he is always drunk. Nothing more resembles what we call inspiration than the delight with which a child absorbs form and colour. I am prepared to go even further and assert that inspiration has something in common with a convulsion, and that every sublime thought is accompanied by a more or less violent nervous shock which has its repercussion in the very core of the brain.69

The artist is simultaneously child and convalescent, because, for both, shock is a source of “sublime” inspiration. Guys’s genius is “nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will”—the experience of shock coupled with the “analysis which enables [the artist] to order the mass of raw material which has involuntarily accumulated.”70 If initially it appears that the most compelling aspect of Guys’s genius is his ability to put the mémoire involontaire to work in the service of artistic expression, this should not dissuade readers from further investigation. The hybridized child-convalescent identity that Baudelaire proposes for Guys establishes an uncannily familiar relationship between artistic production and early childhood perceptions, the most important of which are, as Freud reminds us, those of anatomical difference. When Baudelaire proffers an example to illustrate his discussion of the similarities between the

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convalescent and the child, not surprisingly he produces a sexually charged anecdote that bears this out. In relating the formative experience of “a friend,” he claims that this man’s creative ability was catalyzed by watching his father get dressed in the morning: “It was with a mixture of amazement and delight that he used to study the muscles of his [father’s] arms, the gradual transitions of pink and yellow in his skin, and the bluish network of veins. The picture of eternal life was already filling him with awe and taking hold of his brain. . . . Need I add that today that child is a well-known painter.”71 The childhood celebration of the beauty of the eroticized phallic body resonates forcefully with Freud’s description of the converse distress of the child confronted by the horror of the woman’s “castrated” body. This reversal might of course be read in a homophobic vein as an instance of veiled “inversion” in Baudelaire, but it is, I think, more interesting to read this passage as a striking statement about the way in which male creativity grounds itself in the mastery of shock, in the (re)presentation of the woman’s “castrated” body through a process of mediation and idealization. In such a reading the artist’s childhood recollection of the phallic body testifies to the successful production of the loss of visual control as a vision of phallic prowess, a conversion that dictates that the observation of a nude body be the observation of a phallic body. In Baudelaire’s discussion of Guys’s painting process, artistry is itself cast as the masterful rendition of what has been seen during the day through its transposition onto a sheet of paper. Baudelaire describes Guys’s labor thus: Bending over his table, darting on to a sheet of paper the same glance that a moment ago he was directing towards external things, skirmishing with his pencil, his pen, his brush . . . in a ferment of violent activity, as though afraid that the image might escape him . . . the external world is reborn upon his paper, natural and more than natural, beautiful and more than beautiful, strange and endowed with an impulsive life. . . . All the raw materials with which the memory has loaded itself are put in order, arranged and harmonized, and undergo that forced idealization which is the result of a childlike perceptiveness—that is to say, a perceptiveness acute and magical by reason of its innocence!72

Guys’s childlike frenzy is an attempt to immortalize the image on paper and thus render it reborn. It is an attempt to depict nature as more than natural, to produce a forced idealization of the raw materials stored in memory during the day. Just as the poet in “À une passante” finds “rebirth” in recasting the vision of the crowd as a vision of a woman in mourning, through Guys’s violent activity the external world is recast and transformed. Indeed, Guys’s mediation is structurally akin to the work of the male child confronted with

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the shocking realization of woman’s “castration.” Like the little boy, the artist is involved in frenetically “glossing over . . . the contradiction between observation and perception.”73 For just as the visualization of castration necessitates the loss of visual acuity and consequent psychic mediation, so too does the artist’s visualization of the external world that so shocks his senses. In sharp contrast with the mimetic photograph, Guys’s sketches and paintings are the result of the inscription of life as Guys desires it, not as he perceives it. As Baudelaire praisingly concludes, “All good and true draughtsmen draw from the image imprinted on their brains, and not from nature . . . [so that] finally ideal execution may become as unconscious and spontaneous as is digestion for a healthy man.”74 The artist who deserves praise is he whose ideal execution naturalizes “the principles of the art of seeing” of which Hoffmann so eloquently wrote, for the artist who deserves praise is he who makes it seem that transformation of the initial visual experience is just as spontaneous and natural as the working of the digestive tract.75 In exploring Guys’s artistic process, Baudelaire engenders and genders spectral identity. Guys, who worked for the London Illustrated Journal, was involved in mass communication. And yet, even though his sketches were made into engravings that were later reproduced, his creative process depended not on exact, unmediated replication of what he saw but rather on the transformation of the shocks emanating from the city into artistic expressions. As Baudelaire argues, Guys’s renditions of the city were exemplary precisely because they were the product of Guys’s conversion of the experience of chaos into something more satisfying, into those records of experience that Benjamin would later denote by the term Erfahrung. In lamenting the advent of photography, as in praising Guys, Baudelaire reveals that his anxiety about photography is not only about the decimation of aesthetics but also about the male subject’s inability to constitute a stable gender identity in a situation characterized by rapid technological transformation, urbanization, and ensuing ontological crisis. V. LOSING IT

When Freud’s theories about male infantile genital organization are read in light of Benjamin’s and Baudelaire’s formulations, it becomes clear that Freud too is a theorist who produces the masculine visualization process as a historically specific phenomenon. The mastery of the initial sight of the female genitals inaugurates a loss of visual acuity and a second look at what was initially seen. Through a process of (re)vision, the female body is masculinized by the spectator despite its lack. Most expressly, Freud’s “Fetishism” (1927) avers that most men experience a disparity between the visible and knowable, and it is only through their disavowal of the castration of the female body first witnessed as little boys that they are able to construct a fetish to soothe their assaulted senses. The fetish, a substitute for the

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penis that the woman doesn’t have, a phallic object that stands in to relieve the anxiety produced by woman’s lack, is a visual “substitute for the woman’s (the mother’s) penis that the little boy once believed in and—for reasons familiar to us—does not want to give up.”76 Fetishism, Freud argues, is a form of repression or psychic cover-up; it is an alibi for what is deemed to be missing. It is also a prime example of loss of visual acuity and retrospective (re)vision; for the fetish is a compensation for the loss of visual control that characterizes the masculine gaze in the face of perceived onslaught. As is well known, common fetish objects include underwear and shoes, velvet and fur, those things either directly associated with woman’s genitalia or those that Freud felt might recall the image apprehended by a child looking up between the legs of a woman.77 The fetish may also be, as feminist film theorists suggest, the female body itself.78 According to Freud, the adult male deals with his castration anxiety in one of two ways; he either creates a feminized fetish or, in one of Freud’s classic homophobic moves, he becomes a homosexual who loves only those who literally possess the phallus. The creation of a fetish “saves the fetishist from becoming a homosexual,” Freud writes, “by endowing women with the characteristic which makes them tolerable as sexual objects.” Coming to the end of this thought, Freud concludes, there is “probably no male human being [who] is spared the fright of castration at the sight of a female genital,” for fetishism is the reaction formation proper to the majority of men.79 When placed into dialogue with Benjamin’s and Baudelaire’s texts, Freud’s “Fetishism” articulates how the construction of woman as a fetish object compensates for what the city breaks down. Indeed, I would suggest that Freud’s essay allegorizes vision in urban modernity and works to engender specular masculinity. For it seems that fetishism is as much a reaction to the shock of urbanization and industrialization as to the shock of sexual difference. Like the poet in “À une passante” or Constantin Guys, the fetishist genders the visual scene through a process of (re)vision. In the form of a female fetish (phallus), the city itself is capable of guaranteeing masculine subjectivity. Not surprisingly, one of the many well-known modernist works that Frans Masereel illustrated with his woodcuts was Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, the volume of poetry from which “À une passante” is excerpted by Benjamin. The woodcut, a mediated artistic form, apparently did not threaten Baudelaire, because it did not carry within it the immediacy of the photograph. In the images produced by Masereel’s practiced hand, the shocks of the city could be parried, even reproduced. In the print entitled La Nuit, which will serve as a coda to this essay, this is eloquently illustrated: superimposed over a nighttime cityscape packed with tall buildings, riddled by narrow streets, but devoid of the crowds who populate the labyrinth by day, floats the reposing figure of a huge nude woman.80

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Frans Masereel, La Nuit, 1925 (courtesy of the Art Gallery of Windsor; 䉷 2002 Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn)

NOTES

Thanks to Marshall Brown for his insightful editorial suggestions, to John Archer, Andreas Huyssen, and Jacqueline Rose for teaching the classes that sparked the writing of this essay nearly ten years ago, and to David Kazanjian for reawakening my interest in it. The opening epigraph is from John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books, 1972), 56. 1. Frans Masereel, The City: 100 Woodcuts (New York: Dover Publications, 1972; originally published as Die Stadt [Munich: Kurt Wolff Verlag, 1925]), images 1, 18, 27, 95. 2. Georg Simmel’s “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903), in On Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), is considered a watershed essay on the subject; later theorists, including Benjamin, frequently refer to Simmel. Also see Elizabeth Wilson, The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Andreas Huyssen, “Paris/Childhood: The Fragmented Body in Rilke’s Note-

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books of Malte Laurids Brigge,” in Modernity and the Text, ed. Andreas Huyssen and David Bathrick (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 113–41; Patrice Petro, “Modernity and Mass Culture in Weimar: Contours of a Discourse on Sexuality in Early Theories of Perception and Representation,” New German Critique 40 (winter 1987): 115–46; Marshall Berman, All That’s Solid Melts into Air (New York: Penguin Books, 1982); Susan Buck Morss, “The City as Dreamworld and Catastrophe,” October 73 (summer 1995): 3–26; Susan Buck Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989); and scholarship on the city in Benjamin’s writings, especially Josephine Diamond, “Paris, Baudelaire and Benjamin: The Poetics of Urban Violence,” in City Images: Perspectives from Literature, Philosophy and Film, ed. Mary Ann Caws (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1991), 172–79; John Rignall, “Benjamin’s Flâneur and the Problem of Realism,” in The Problems of Modernity: Adorno and Benjamin, ed. Andrew Benjamin (New York: Routledge, 1989), 112–21; Andrew Benjamin, “Tradition and Experience: Walter Benjamin’s ‘Some Motifs in Baudelaire,’” in The Problems of Modernity, ed. A. Benjamin, 122–40; Graeme Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City (Cambridge: Polity Press 1996); Ackbar Abbas, “Walter Benjamin’s Collector: The Fate of Modern Experience,” in Modernity and the Text, ed. Huyssen and Bathrick, 216–40; Howard Caygill, “The Experience of the City,” in Walter Benjamin: The Color of Experience (New York: Routledge, 1998), 118–48; and Sigrid Weigel, Body-Image-Space: Rereading Walter Benjamin, trans. Georgiani Paul et al. (New York: Routledge, 1996). 3. I follow Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), 1–24, in expanding the terrain of the visual field in order to encompass an entire cultural horizon, including the construction of the observer. 4. See Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16 (1975): 6–18; E. Ann Kaplan “Is the Gaze Male?” in Desire, ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson (London: Virago, 1983), 321–38; Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 1986); Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (New York: Methuen, 1988); Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Constance Penley, The Future of an Illusion: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989); Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992); Constance Penley, ed., Feminism and Film Theory (New York: Routledge, 1988); and Janet Bergstrom and Mary Ann Doane, eds., “Spectatrix,” special issue, Camera Obscura 20 –21 (September 1989). 5. My argument resonates with Silverman’s. In her work on “historical trauma,” she argues that Hollywood had an ideological need to produce women as fetishists capable of denying the lack they perceived in the returning wounded of World War II by transforming women’s relationships into cinematic images of veterans. In so doing Silverman distinguishes between the “gaze,” an ideologically dominant, transhistorical masculine construct, and the “look,” the historically specific spectral position occupied by female viewers and other lacking subjects who are required to confer upon the white male subject his sense of phallic sufficiency. Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins, 8–9, 130–31, 137–38, 142–46, and 155–57. 6. Benjamin discusses Baudelaire in his 1935 sketch for his Arcades Project

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or Passagen Werk, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” in Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 146–62; and in his study “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” written in 1938 and substantially revised in response to concerns raised by Theodor Adorno. The text I focus on here (first published in Zietschrift für Sozialforschung in 1939) is the final result of their exchange. See Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations, ed. and intro. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 155–200. Benjamin’s writings on Baudelaire have been posthumously collected in Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Verso, 1983). All references to the German are to Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: Ein Lyriker im Zeitalter des Hochkapitalismus, Zwei Fragmente (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1969). There are additional fragments on Baudelaire in Walter Benjamin, “A Small History of Photography” (1931), in One Way Street, ed. Susan Sontag (London: Verso, 1985), 240 –57; and Walter Benjamin, “Central Park” (1938–39), New German Critique 34 (winter 1985): 32–57. The exchange between Benjamin and Adorno is reprinted in Ronald Taylor, trans. and ed., Aesthetics and Politics, afterword by Fredric Jameson (London: Verso, 1977), 110–41. 7. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs,” 168. 8. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs,” 193. 9. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs,” 193. 10. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs,” 157. 11. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs,” 156. 12. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs,” 159. 13. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs,” 161. 14. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs,” 160. 15. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs,” 160–61. 16. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs,” 161. 17. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs,” 162. 18. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs,” 165. 19. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs,” 167. 20. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs,” 168. 21. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs,” 165. 22. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs,” 168. 23. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs,” 168–69. 24. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs,” 169. 25. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs,” 169. Specifically, the objects that catch the poet’s eye are the woman’s “swaying festoon and embroidered hem.” These material markers link this figure in mourning to the courtesans who rivet the artist’s eye with their “burden of embroidered petticoats” in Baudelaire’s essay on Guys. See Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (New York: Da Capo Press, 1986), 36. The essay was written during 1859 and 1860 and first published in 1863. 26. I echo Patrice Petro, who suggests that in the Weimar period Berlin was connoted as female. See Petro, “Modernity and Mass Culture in Weimar.” 27. Baudelaire, “Painter of Modern Life,” 34, 30. Janet Wolff argues that Baudelaire’s misogyny is paradigmatic of the treatment of women in most modernist texts,

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focused as they are on the experience of men in the public world of work, politics, and city life. Wolff characterizes the flâneur as prototypically male. Elizabeth Wilson redresses this situation by postulating a female flâneuse in the figure of the prostitute. Though I am sympathetic to these correctives, I place emphasis on the construction of the dominant modern spectator rather than on the missing flâneuse. See Janet Wolff, “The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity,” in The Problems of Modernity, ed. A. Benjamin, 141–57; and Elizabeth Wilson, “The Invisible Flâneur,” New Left Review 191 ( January–February 1992): 90–110. 28. Baudelaire, “Painter of Modern Life,” 35, 30. 29. Baudelaire, “Painter of Modern Life,” 30. 30. Baudelaire, “Painter of Modern Life,” 31. In his discussion of cosmetics, Baudelaire engages indirectly with Rousseau. Nature is a meaningless category, he avers, for there is nothing that is either good or beautiful simply because it is natural. Like morality, beauty is the work of artifice and reason. Woman’s gift is her ability to “lift herself above Nature” and create an unflawed exterior (30–32). 31. Quoted phrase is from Baudelaire, “Painter of Modern Life,” 36. 32. In the eighteenth century the male subject vacated his position as marker of aristocratic privilege as displayed through sartorial extravagance. With the rise of the bourgeoisie, use of dress as a signifier of power dwindled and woman’s dress became an increasingly important sign of wealth. By the nineteenth century women had become responsible for putting the world of commodities on display. See Kaja Silverman, “Fragments of a Fashionable Discourse,” in Studies in Entertainment, ed. Tania Modleski (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 139–52. Silverman’s argument follows Thorstein Veblen’s. Of course Baudelaire persistently elides the fact that the prostitutes, courtesans, and actresses whom he discusses sell that special commodity that Marx calls labor power. Reworking the economic calculus to suit his ends, Baudelaire argues that the aesthetics of commodification transcend the misery and banality of life in bourgeois society, such that women’s sartorial display, rather than their economic exploitation, becomes the principal manifestation of nineteenth-century capitalism. Although Benjamin does not foreground questions of fashion in his discussion of Baudelaire, in his comments on Granville, changing representations of fashion index modernization on the streets of Paris. Fashion pledges its allegiance to capitalism by seducing the organic world into sexual union with the inorganic: Fashion “couples the living body to the inorganic world. Against the living it asserts the rights of the corpse. Fetishism, which is subject to the sex appeal of the inorganic, is its vital nerve. The cult of commodities places it in its service” (Benjamin, “Paris, Capital,” 153). Such reasoning indicates why it is that the woman in “À une passante” is cloaked in mourning attire: her commodity appeal emanates from her proximity to death. 33. Benjamin, “Paris, Capital,” 157. Benjamin argues that Baudelaire denigrated working women because he recognized a commonality between the poet’s plight and that of the prostitute. “Baudelaire knew what the true situation of the man of letters was: he goes to the marketplace . . . supposedly to take a look at it, but in reality to find a buyer” (Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: Lyric Poet, 17). Women and poets share a marginal position within the modernizing and industrializing urban economy: both walk the streets hoping to convert their wandering into productive labor. In his essay on Guys, Baudelaire muses, “If in one aspect the actress is akin

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to the courtesan, in another she comes close to the poet. We must never forget that quite apart from natural, and even artificial, beauty each human being bears the distinctive stamp of his trade, a characteristic which can be translated into physical ugliness, but also into a sort of ‘professional’ beauty” (Baudelaire, “Painter of Modern Life,” 37). Though Baudelaire notes a connection between poets and prostitutes, he defends himself against that which he knew too well. As Benjamin alerts readers, it was when Baudelaire spoke from the vantage point of a walking commodity that his need to disassociate himself from other commodities became greatest: “The more conscious [Baudelaire] becomes of his mode of existence, the mode imposed upon him by the system of production . . . the more he will be gripped by the chill of the commodity economy and the less he will feel like empathizing with other commodities” (Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: Lyric Poet, 58). As he wrote, the petty bourgeois class to which Baudelaire belonged continued to lose influence. Like the women whom he condemned, Baudelaire occupied a precarious social and economic position. 34. Baudelaire, “Painter of Modern Life,” 37, 34. 35. I am indebted to Huyssen’s thesis that the masculinization of modernist aesthetic values can be read as a reaction formation to the persistent gendering as feminine of that which is culturally devalued. See Andreas Huyssen, “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other,” in Studies in Entertainment, ed. Modleski, 188–207. 36. For example, in a reading of Freud’s analysis of a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci that depicts a curiously inaccurate version of a penetrative heterosexual sex act, Rose focuses on why it is that Freud finds da Vinci’s drawing distressing: the “depiction is . . . uncomfortable, undesirable and without desire. . . . It is also inverted: the man’s head looks like that of a woman, and the feet are the wrong way around.” Rose reads Freud’s displeasure as one targeted at the artist’s inability to make meaning of sexual difference in the representational space: “The uncertain sexual identity muddles the plane of the image so that the spectator does not know where she or he stands in relationship to the picture. A confusion at the level of sexuality brings with it a disturbance of the visual field.” See Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 1986), 226. 37. Sigmund Freud, “The Infantile Genital Organization” (1923), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 19, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), 142. 38. Freud, “Infantile Genital Organization,” 143. 39. Freud, “Infantile Genital Organization,” 144. In the two additional essays mentioned above, Freud develops his ideas further. As in “The Infantile Genital Organization,” he adduces that the primary means for consolidating masculinity is visual misapprehension or, more precisely, loss of visual acuity accompanied by (re)vision of what was initially perceived. Again Freud informs readers that the boy’s process of visualization pivots not on what is observed but rather on a loss of visual control signaled by disavowal. Despite Freud’s frequent assertion of a chronology of scopic events, ambivalence characterizes the relationship between primary and secondary processes in all three essays. Thus the temporal succession of first and second sight is less important than Freud’s retroactive construction of faulty first sight as a projection of subsequent sights. See Sigmund Freud, “The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex” (1924), in Standard Edition, vol. 19, especially 174; and Sig-

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mund Freud, “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes” (1925), in Standard Edition, vol. 19, especially 252. 40. Freud, “Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex,” 178. 41. Freud, “Some Psychical Consequences,” 252. These lines, in which Freud seems to proclaim that “Anatomy is Destiny,” have outraged feminist scholars, who wonder why girls would necessarily respond in such a speedy and self-critical way to the revelation of the male body. See, among others, Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); Sarah Kofman, The Enigma of Woman, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); Teresa Brennan, Interpretations of the Flesh: Freud and Feminism (New York: Routledge, 1992); and Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). 42. Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism (1939), in Standard Edition, vol. 23, 126. The analogy drawn between the work of the psyche and photography appears two other times. In the first, Freud compares the relation of conscious and unconscious activity to that of photographs and negatives: “The first state of the photograph is the ‘negative’; every photographic picture has to pass through the ‘negative process,’ and some of these negatives which have held good in examination are admitted to the ‘positive process’ ending in the picture.” See Sigmund Freud, “A Note on the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis” (1912), in Standard Edition, vol. 12, 264. In the second instance, Freud uses the idea of photography to “form a picture” of the vicissitudes of the unconscious and the work of repression. He writes, “Let us assume that every mental process . . . exists to begin with in an unconscious stage or phase and that it is only from there that the process passes over into the conscious phase, just as a photographic picture begins as a negative and only becomes a picture after being turned into a positive.” See Sigmund Freud, “Lecture XIX: Resistance and Repression” (1917), in Standard Edition, vol. 16, 295. In contrast with his later use of the photographic analogy in Moses and Monotheism, in which negatives represent the storehouse of unconsciously apprehended images that are later resurrected, in the two earlier uses the negative represents untapped psychic material that is inadmissible to consciousness. 43. Baer’s reading of Jean Martin Charcot’s Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière proposes a structural relationship between photography—particularly the use of the photographic flash—and psychoanalysis. The flash constitutes a connection between pathology and technology, for it was through its use that Charcot produced the very disease that he desired to cure. The hysterical catalepsy provoked by the discharge of the photographic flash “retains by way of the body what photography retains by way of the camera: it freezes and retains the body in an isolated position that can be viewed and theorized.” See Ulrich Baer, “Photography and Hysteria: Towards a Poetics of the Flash,” Yale Journal of Criticism 7 (1994): 41–78, quotation on 53. I follow Baer in both an analogical and a structural relationship between psychic processes and mechanical ones. From this perspective, photography is central to Freud’s theoretical development, for psychoanalysis anticipates, as it utilizes, the mode of seeing embodied in the photograph. 44. Freud again makes recourse to Hoffmann (“The Sand Man”) in “The Uncanny” (1919), in Standard Edition, vol. 17. 45. Quoted in Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 126.

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46. Steven Paul Scher, “E. T. A. Hoffmann,” Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 90: German Writers in the Age of Goethe (New York: Bruccoli Clark Layman Books, 1989), 1789–832. Freud does not cite a source for his information on Hoffmann. 47. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs,” 170, 172. Benjamin points out that Poe’s convalescent spectator’s “composure has given way to manic behavior” (172), and thus he is unable to parry the shocks of city streets. As Rignall argues, this tips readers off to the real comparison made in Benjamin’s reading of Poe’s story: that between Baudelaire and Poe themselves, not their spectators. It is Poe who watches his spectator watching and then transforms this experience into art. See Rignall, “Benjamin’s Flâneur and the Problem of Realism.” 48. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs,” 172–74. If anything, Benjamin underestimates the feminization of Hoffmann’s crowd; of the numerous characters Hoffmann’s viewer describes, nearly all are female. See E. T. A. Hoffmann, “My Cousin’s Corner Window,” in Four Romantic Tales: From Nineteenth Century German, Tieck/Bretano/Arnim/Hoffmann, trans. Helene Scher (New York: Ungar, 1975), 85–114. 49. The argument that follows builds on the work of others who have sought to understand the figure of the photograph in Benjamin’s and/or Baudelaire’s writings. See Miriam Hansen, “Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: ‘The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology,’” New German Critique 40 (winter 1987): 179–224; Elissa Marder, “Flat Death: Snapshots of History,” Diacritics 22 (fall–winter 1992): 128– 45; Eduardo Cadava, “Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History,” Diacritics 22 (fall–winter 1992): 84–114; Patrice Petro, “After Shock/Between Boredom and History,” in Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 265–84; and Susan Blood, “Baudelaire against Photography: An Allegory of Old Age,” Modern Language Notes 101 (September 1986): 817–37. 50. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Arendt, 217–51, 222. 51. Benjamin, “Work of Art,” 222. Benjamin cites Marx thus: “It is a common characteristic of all capitalist production . . . that the worker does not make use of the working conditions. The working conditions make use of the worker; but it takes machinery to give this reversal a technically concrete form. [Workers learn to coordinate] their own movements with the uniformly constant movements of an automaton” (Benjamin, “On Some Motifs,” 175). 52. Benjamin, “Work of Art,” 219. 53. Benjamin, “Work of Art,” 221, 222. 54. Benjamin, “Work of Art,” 237. 55. Benjamin, “Small History,” 243. 56. Benjamin, “Small History,” 256. 57. Benjamin, “Small History,” 256. 58. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs,” 186. 59. The first quote is from W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 281. Mitchell paraphrases Barthes, to whom the next two formulations can be attributed. See Roland Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” in Image/Music/Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 19. Framing these observations historically, Nancy Armstrong writes, “No matter how crudely it stages an object, the nine-

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teenth-century photograph never allows us to entertain the possibility that its materials are less than real.” See Armstrong, “City Things: Photography and the Urbanization Process,” in Human, All Too Human, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1996), 112. 60. See Allan Sekula’s discussion of the use of photographs in orchestrating turn-of-the-century social control in “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (1986): 3–64; Armstrong’s discussion of the role of photography in organizing urban space in “City Things”; and Sander Gilman’s discussion of photography’s role in diagnosing mental illness in “The Image of the Hysteric,” in Sander Gilman et al., Hysteria beyond Freud (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 345–452. 61. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs,” 186. 62. Cadava argues that Benjamin associated realism with the fascist aestheticization of politics and war and thus wrote about photography in order to uncover the coincidence of the emergence of photographic realism and the historical crisis of world war. I agree with Cadava that Benjamin “conceives of history in the language of photography,” but situate Benjamin’s comments about realism in relation to his ideas about Baudelaire’s aesthetics rather than (but not instead of) fascist ones. See Cadava, “Words of Light,” 84. 63. Baudelaire, “Painter of Modern Life,” 13. 64. Explaining these ideas, Benjamin writes that the photograph extended the range of the mémoire volontaire by making it “possible for an event at any time to be permanently recorded” and thus recalled at will (“On Some Motifs,” 186). In contrast, the mémoire involontaire is connected to the unique image created through the collaboration of eye and hand and is thus associated with the aura. 65. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs,” 194. 66. Quoted phrase from Benjamin, “On Some Motifs,” 173. 67. Baudelaire, “Painter of Modern Life,” 8. 68. Baudelaire, “Painter of Modern Life,” 7. 69. Baudelaire, “Painter of Modern Life,” 8. 70. Baudelaire, “Painter of Modern Life,” 8. 71. Baudelaire, “Painter of Modern Life,” 8. 72. Baudelaire, “Painter of Modern Life,” 12. 73. Freud, “The Infantile Genital Organization,” 144. 74. Baudelaire, “Painter of Modern Life,” 16–17. 75. This formulation is suggestive of a broader nineteenth-century discourse on the energetics of the male body in which “healthy” digestion and “normal” heterosexuality stand in for each other, such that healthy emerges as a synonym for straight. 76. Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism” (1927), in Standard Edition, vol. 21, 56. 77. Emily Apter treats the mingling of erotic and materialist desire in Feminizing the Fetish (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). In both Marx and Freud fetishism is visual, and the fetish a highly charged meeting point for psychoanalytic and materialist discourses. 78. In working through “Fetishism,” Mulvey and others argue that in the cinema the consummate fetish is the actress on the screen who does not have a penis but is herself a phallus whose presence allows the male viewer to constitute himself as a subject in relation to the mise-en-scène. The camera’s gaze, like that of the assumed spectator, is male. Rey Chow draws out the parallel between Freudian fetish-

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ism and Benjaminian ideas about film in “Walter Benjamin’s Love Affair with Death,” New German Critique 48 (fall 1989): 73–77. 79. Freud, “Fetishism,” 56. 80. Frans Masereel, La Nuit (1936), in the gallery exhibition catalog Tribute: An Exhibition of Paintings, Watercolors, and Graphics, foreword by Kenneth Saltmarche (Windsor, Ontario: Art Gallery of Windsor, 1981), plate 40.

Ann Cvetkovich

Legacies of Trauma, Legacies of Activism ACT UP’s Lesbians

The AIDS crisis, like other traumatic encounters with death, has challenged our strategies for remembering the dead, forcing the invention of new forms of mourning and commemoration. The same is true, I would argue, for AIDS activism. What is the current meaning of the slogan “The AIDS crisis is not over” in the context of treatment with protease inhibitors and an ever-widening gap, of transnational proportions, between medical possibility and political and economic reality, a gap that has significantly shifted the early associations of AIDS with gay men? Like activism itself, the slogan’s meaning is constantly shifting. In March 1997, ACT UP/NY marked its tenth anniversary with a return to the site of its inaugural Wall Street protest; while the event suggested an ongoing AIDS activism, it was also the occasion for looking back on a time that seemed now located in the past. What kind of memorial would be appropriate for a movement that, while not exactly dead, since ACT UP/NY and other chapters continue to meet, is dramatically changed? When is it important to move on, and when is it useful, if painful, to return to the past? I ask these questions about ACT UP in particular, because, in the process whereby AIDS activism was the catalyst for what has now become mainstream gay politics and consumer visibility, something got lost along the way, and I’m mourning that loss along with the loss of so many lives. Another of my interests in approaching the wide range of traumas produced by AIDS through the more specific topic of activism is to explore the assumption that trauma is best addressed by public and collective formations rather than private or therapeutic ones. Such formations pit affective and political solutions to social problems against one another. There is often good reason to do so; my own work on sensationalism has suggested as much in examining the affective powers of melodramatic, sentimental, 427

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and sensational representations as a displaced response to social problems.1 More recently, Lauren Berlant continues this line of argument when she proposes that within sentimental culture “the authenticity of overwhelming pain that can be textually performed and shared is disseminated as a prophylactic against the reproduction of a shocking and numbing mass violence.”2 My goal here, though, is to challenge such paradigms by scrutinizing activism for its affective and even therapeutic dimensions and to question divisions between public and private, affective and political, upon which such distinctions rest. ACT UP is a suggestive example for this project insofar as the group was forged out of the emotional crucible of anger and grief created by homophobic neglect and an escalating number of deaths. Only with a fuller sense of the affective life of politics can we avoid too easy assertions of a “political” solution to the affective consequences of trauma in which politics becomes a phantasmatic structure that effects its own forms of displacement. I feel a particular urgency about remembering and documenting ACT UP because, for me, as someone who grew up in the shadow of the 1960s, old enough to have vivid memories of new social movements but too young to have participated in them very directly, AIDS activism represented a significant instance of post-1960s movement activism. It built on the models of direct action established by the civil rights, antiwar, women’s, and gay and lesbian movements, thus proving they were still viable, but it was not simply repeating the past, since it also created new forms of cultural and media activism and incorporated a distinctive flair for the visual and performative. I was a member of Austin’s ACT UP group from 1989, when it started, until 1991, when it became less active. Since then, I have been trying to figure out what to make of an experience that has had a changing but persistent and indelible impact on my life. I also can’t forget ACT UP because it is entwined with the experience of death; I was drawn to it because of my relationship with two friends, one of whom was the first person I knew closely who was HIV positive, the other of whom, his lover, helped found ACT UP/ Austin very shortly after he tested positive. When first one and then the other got very sick, I spent less time doing activism and more time taking care of them; after their death, I didn’t really return to ACT UP. Remembering ACT UP has become a way of keeping their memories alive. Throughout this period and even well after it, I was fascinated with ACT UP/NY, which operated on a far grander scale than Austin’s group. I attended meetings whenever I was in New York, and during the summer of 1990, I participated in the activities of what was then the Women’s Caucus. I was enormously affected by the energy, passion, and productivity of the Monday night meetings at the Lesbian and Gay Community Center. (As it turns out I was not alone; the excitement and intensity of ACT UP meetings, as much as the demonstrations, are a frequent topic in the interviews I

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discuss below.) AIDS activism in New York also meant cultural activism; the videos produced by ACT UP’s DIVA-TV collective and the Testing the Limits collective, the Living with AIDS series produced by the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) as well as its Safer Sex shorts, Video Databank’s collection Video against AIDS, and an array of graphics, documented in Douglas Crimp’s and Adam Rolston’s AIDS DemoGraphics extended the reach of ACT UP and fostered a public culture organized around AIDS activism.3 I was also intrigued by the strong presence of women and lesbians in ACT UP, some of whom were working specifically on women and AIDS issues. Cultural documents such as the book Women, AIDS, and Activism, a publication that grew out of a Women and AIDS Handbook first developed for teachins, and Maria Maggenti and Jean Carlomusto’s video Doctors, Liars, and Women, about ACT UP’s 1988 demonstration against Cosmopolitan magazine, drew attention to work that might otherwise have remained invisible except to those directly involved in ACT UP/NY.4 It has seemed all the more urgent to provide a history of ACT UP’s lesbians when, with the passage of time, ACT UP is in danger of being remembered as a group of privileged gay white men without a strong political sensibility and sometimes critiqued on those grounds.5 Once again the lesbians, many of whom came to ACT UP with considerable previous political experience, seem to be some of the first to disappear from ACT UP’s history. Also troubling is the dismissal of ACT UP as too radical, as internally divided, or even as a failure. Jean Carlomusto worries about “reductive” representations that “flatten the complexities”: “After a while we’ve seen so much footage of demonstrations and people yelling at buildings, and doing ‘die-ins,’ that it’s almost used the way images of bra-burning were used to reduce feminism to a one-note kind of deal.”6 Watching ACT UP’s history become prone to disappearance and misrepresentation has made me wonder about how other activisms have been (mis)represented. And I have also wondered how best to document AIDS activism both in its time and for the future, since its preservation makes the claim that it mattered, that it made a difference. Over time I also kept noticing the ongoing productivity of ACT UP’s lesbians; they were making films, videos, and visual art, writing novels and creating magazines, tending to the Lesbian Herstory Archives, and forming new activist groups such as the Lesbian Avengers. Sometimes the work addressed AIDS activism very explicitly, as in Sarah Schulman’s novels People in Trouble and Rat Bohemia or Anne D’Adesky’s publication of the magazine HIV Plus, but even when the connections were more diffuse, as in Ellen Spiro’s move from safe sex videos to trailer park life or Zoe Leonard’s photographs of the trees on the streets of the Lower East Side, I could see the legacy of AIDS activism and death.7 But even this rich archive of cultural materials couldn’t answer all of my questions. I wanted to know how people

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look back on their experience with ACT UP, whether they miss it, and whether it has continued to inspire and sustain them. Uncertain of my own answers to these questions, I decided to consult with others and thus embarked on an experiment in ethnography and oral history by interviewing AIDS activists and, more specifically, lesbians involved with ACT UP/NY. I focused on ACT UP’s most visible and welldocumented chapter, because I wanted to get a sense of the more ephemeral network of friendships and publics that accompanied its vast archive of graphics, documentaries, and papers.8 Here’s a very compressed list of questions and concerns I brought to the task of interviewing ACT UP’s lesbians: How was it that AIDS and ACT UP fostered distinctive coalitions between lesbians and gay men, coalitions that brought new understandings to the word queer? If the erotic and affective bonds that underlie political bonds were heightened by ACT UP’s reputation as a cruising ground, as well as its proximity to death, what was the role of lesbians as friends, lovers, allies, caretakers? From the vantage point of lesbian participation, what does the tension within ACT UP between whether to focus on AIDS and treatment issues exclusively or whether to tackle other related political issues look like? Examining the trauma of AIDS as it affects not just gay men but lesbians as caretakers and activists is a way of casting a wide net for trauma’s everyday effects. One legacy of AIDS activism for lesbians is that they have had a legacy, have had the privilege of moving on because they have remained alive. What does this experience of survival reveal about the particular mix of death and burnout that some people cite as reasons for ACT UP’s waning? And for those lesbians involved with ACT UP’s cultural projects, including graphic arts and media, what has been its impact on their subsequent work as artists? I aim not to provide a representative picture of ACT UP but to intervene against the construction of such a thing, to capture something of the many specificities of its history and its legacy. Although my use of oral history is inspired by my particular emotional needs, my most ambitious aspiration has been to use it also to create a collective public sphere out of the individual stories of people who once worked collectively and are now more dispersed. Bringing the stories together serves as a reminder that the experiences they document are historically significant and shared. MOURNING AND MILITANCY REVISITED

This essay is part of a book about lesbian sites of trauma that includes topics such as the sexual act of penetration, butch emotional vulnerability, immigration, and archives.9 It is something of a relief, however odd or inappropriate that feeling might be, to turn to the subject of AIDS, because its status as trauma seems relatively uncontested. Even sexual abuse can be

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more complicated to legitimate as social trauma, fraught as it is with distinctions between private and public pain and between emotional damage and the hard fact of death. But, of course, AIDS is no different especially as a specifically sexual trauma. Public recognition of traumatic experience has often been achieved only through cultural struggle, and one way to view AIDS activism, especially in the 1980s, is as the demand for such recognition. That battle has involved combatting homophobia, among other forms of oppression, which has ignored the experiences of those disproportionately affected by AIDS by casting them as outside the general public. AIDS thus has achieved the status of what I call national trauma, standing alongside the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, World War I, and other nationand world-defining events as having a profound impact on history and politics. Surely national attention to AIDS constitutes a considerable victory given the early association of AIDS with gay men and hence its central place in the politics of homophobia. Moreover, AIDS has produced renewed forms of a radical politics of sexuality, through its links to “vices” and “perversions” such as drug use and sex work. Through issues such as immigration, the prison system, and the national and global economics of health care, it has also required an analysis and a political strategy that links sexuality to race, class, and nation. But it seems to me that only some versions of AIDS make it into the national public sphere or archive that includes cultural artifacts such as red ribbons, Rent, and Philadelphia. Even the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt and Angels in America, which are complex cases worthy of the considerable critical and public attention that they have received, are on a different order from ACT UP and its cultural archive of AIDS DemoGraphics, DIVA-TV videos, and Gran Fury public art projects. And even that very specialized archive does not always reveal a lesbian presence very clearly. In what form, then, does AIDS achieve its status as national trauma? While connected to the insidious and everyday forms of trauma generated by sexism and racism and other forms of oppression, the spectacular body count of AIDS commands attention, and indeed comparisons with the body counts in wars are often used to underscore its devastating impact. More so even than the sexual trauma of incest, which occupies the ambiguous terrain of what Lauren Berlant has called the “intimate public sphere,” it seems to have made its way into the canon of national public culture.10 Within the university and cultural studies approaches to trauma, the inclusion of AIDS in, for example, Cathy Caruth’s important collection Trauma: Explorations in Memory or Marita Sturken’s Tangled Memories can be taken as signs of the success of this effort.11 Rooted very strongly, but not exclusively, in Holocaust studies, Caruth’s collection includes an interview with AIDS activists Gregg Bordowitz and Douglas Crimp about the current state of the health crisis and hence facilitates the production of trauma studies as an

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interdisciplinary field that crosses many national and cultural sites.12 Sturken focuses on the Vietnam War and AIDS as defining moments that generate “cultural memory,” a process of politicized history-making in which the nation uses representation in order to work through trauma. Precisely because it is so consonant with my own project, Sturken’s book also provides an important point of contrast with it. Among the valuable contributions of Tangled Memories is its argument for the centrality of both memory and culture in the national public sphere, and the strategic and legitimating effects of equating the AIDS crisis with the Vietnam War cannot be underestimated. In chapters that explore representations of AIDS, the AIDS Memorial Quilt (as comparable to the Vietnam War Memorial), and discourses of immunology, Sturken includes consideration of ACT UP and the cultural theory that surrounds it. But while Sturken’s inclusive approach accomplishes a great deal, indeed offers the legitimating attention sought by AIDS activism, it also mutes the critical and oppositional force of the more marginal(ized) forms of activism that are my focus. ACT UP’s memory is not the nation’s memory, and my more selective focus aims to illuminate a counterpublic memory that has a critical relation to the more prominent national representations of AIDS that threaten to overshadow it. One of the most important contributions of this more specifically gay and more specifically activist AIDS culture to understandings of trauma has been its insights about mourning. Still occupying a canonical position in my AIDS/trauma archive is Douglas Crimp’s essay “Mourning and Militancy.”13 I first heard it presented as a keynote address at the 1989 Gay and Lesbian Studies conference at Yale, where it marked an occasion when activists and academics were in close communication and something only later named queer theory was taking off. Returning to it now, I am reminded of Jean Carlomusto’s remarks in Gregg Bordowitz’s 1994 video, Fast Trip, Long Drop, about how the activist documentaries of an earlier period have taken on new meanings, as the footage that once offered proud testimony of a robust and angry resistance becomes a memorial because it depicts those who are now dead. Indeed, Fast Trip, Long Drop provides inspiration for this project because it chronicles Bordowitz’s disenchantment with activism in the face of the ongoing persistence of the AIDS epidemic, introducing depression and melancholy as complications to Crimp’s discussion of mourning and militancy (in which he acknowledges Bordowitz’s influence). Crimp’s essay can conjure feelings of mourning, as well as nostalgia, for a lost community and a past moment of activism, but it also remains powerful and relevant for trauma studies. Grounded in activism, it offers an achingly concrete, as well as novel, validation of the famous Freud essay it invokes, and it provides a fresh approach to cultural theory’s long-standing

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preoccupation with the tensions between psychic and political accounts of social problems. Crimp argues that militancy cannot ease every psychic burden and that the persistence of mourning, if not also melancholy, must be reckoned with in the context of activism. Turning around a familiar opposition between private therapy and public activism (exemplified by the slogan “Don’t mourn, organize!”), he reads militancy as an emotional response and as a possible mode of containment of an irremediable psychic distress. This essay is part of a range of texts and practices, including Simon Watney’s observations about the politics of funerals in which gay men remain closeted and David Wojnarowicz’s vision of throwing dead bodies onto the steps of the White House, that have scrambled the relations between mourning and militancy and between affect and activism.14 Adding new resonance to the term intimate public sphere, these practices counter the invisibility of and indifference to feelings of loss by making them extravagantly public and building collective cultural practices that can acknowledge and showcase them. Crimp also reminds us that trauma takes many forms, that AIDS means not just the specter of death but also the loss of particular forms of sexual contact and sexual culture, and that one might mourn the loss of unsafe sex as much as the death of one’s friends or the prospect of one’s own death. His argument echoes Laura Brown’s essay on the implications of gendered experience for definitions of trauma, in which she introduces the term insidious trauma to encompass the ways in which punctual events, such as rape and sexual abuse, are linked to more pervasive and everyday experiences of sexism.15 She argues that definitions of trauma as “outside the range of human experience” cannot do justice to the traumatic effects of a sexism that does its work precisely by being constructed as normal.16 Brown’s argument can be bolstered and extended by queer theory’s critique of “normativity” and the myriad ways in which it is embedded in practices of sexuality and intimacy. Douglas Crimp’s attention to the insidious traumas that pervade sexual practices and funerals in a time of AIDS is startlingly material. In making a claim for not being able to use Crisco or not being able to fuck without a condom as one of the losses of AIDS, he introduces the everyday life of sexual practices into the discourse of trauma in a particularly graphic way. Moreover, the claim that safe sex constitutes a loss challenges the dismissal of certain practices as decadent or perverse as well as the tendency to think that only certain forms or magnitudes of loss count as real. Trauma makes itself felt in everyday practices and nowhere more insidiously or insistently than in converting what was once pleasure into the specter of loss or in preventing the acknowledgment of such losses. It may be a necessity rather than a luxury to consider trauma’s impact on sexual life or to consider how its effects are mediated through forms of oppression such as homophobia. This insight

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seems all the more relevant in the context of the shifting cultures of safe and unsafe sex; recent controversies about barebacking don’t make sense without some sympathetic understanding of the attractions of unsafe sex and the significance of its loss. Crimp emphasizes the ways in which putatively “normal” practices of mourning are foreclosed for gay men—because they are faced with the prospect of their own deaths, because gay identities are erased at funerals organized by families, because they have been at too many funerals—and thus suggests not only that psychic processes are profoundly affected by social circumstances but also that Freud’s production of the “normal” in relation to mourning might be challenged from the vantage point of queer theory. Although Crimp is suspicious of the category of melancholy because Freud constructs it as an instance of “pathological mourning,” and he wants to resist pathologizing accounts of homosexuality, another strategy for a queer reading of Freud might be to return to melancholy and its supposed abnormalities. In “Mourning Remains,” the introduction to this anthology, David L. Eng and David Kazanjian propose just such a revisionist reading of Freud: Were one to understand melancholia better, Freud implies, one would no longer insist on its pathological nature. . . . We suggest that a better understanding of melancholic attachments to loss might depathologize those attachments, making visible not only their social bases but also their creative, unpredictable, political aspects. . . . In this regard, we find in Freud’s conception of melancholia’s persistent struggle with its lost objects not simply a “grasping” and “holding” on to a fixed notion of the past but rather a continuous engagement with loss and its remains.

This essay and the research on which it is based operate in the spirit of this productive suggestion. Like Eng and Kazanjian, I refuse the sharp distinction between mourning and melancholy that leads Dominick LaCapra, for example, to differentiate between “working through,” the successful resolution of trauma, and “acting out,” the repetition of trauma that does not lead to transformation.17 Not only does the distinction often seem tautological—good responses to trauma are cases of working through, bad ones are cases of acting out—but the verbal link between “acting out” and ACT UP suggests that activism’s modes of acting out, especially its performative and expressive functions, are a crucial resource for responding to trauma. Using a richer and more sympathetic sense of melancholy to revisit Crimp’s distinction between mourning and militancy not only bolsters his argument but also explains its continued relevance. Crimp ultimately argues that mourning and militancy are intertwined rather than opposed; by

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looking at activism as a response to psychic needs, one that emerges from a desire to project the internal externally, he is in a position to see it as open-ended and ambiguous. Such insight is crucial to understanding the emotions produced by the persistence of AIDS and social injustice amid the waning of AIDS activism (which Crimp himself explores in his own essay in this volume). While this current state of affairs can produce debilitating forms of melancholy, Eng and Kazanjian’s approach to melancholy suggests that this need not be the case. Returning to ACT UP’s history in order to find what remains need not be a nostalgic holding on to the past but can instead be a productive resource for the present and future. In the aftermath of activism, emotional life can be more subtle and more ambivalent, because there is no longer the clear enemy or fixed target for activism that produces righteous indignation and anger. Just as Douglas Crimp calls attention to the insidious effects of AIDS on sexual practices, so too would the documentation of activism require attention to a range of everyday emotions that might otherwise fly under the radar screen of trauma studies. To remain attentive to these emotions is to ward off the sense of political failure that can add one more dull blow to the loss from death. Moreover, the continued relevance of an essay such as “Mourning and Militancy” is another reminder that the archive of activism remains alive. AN EXPERIMENT IN QUEER ETHNOGR APHY

My project can’t really be appreciated without some sense of how unusual, and hence experimental, my choice of interviews as a research method has been. At the risk of reinventing the wheels of oral history, ethnography, and even social science research, I have approached an unfamiliar methodology from the vantage point of a cultural critic accustomed to working with an already existing archive rather than creating one. In fact, I came to oral history with a certain amount of resistance, given that my theoretical background had taught me to be suspicious of what Joan Scott calls “the evidence of experience.”18 If our identities as intellectuals are revealed by the texts we love, then you should know that one of my all-time favorite essays is Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” a critique of presumptions that the disempowered can speak the conditions of their exploitation (or be known to intellectuals through their personal testimony).19 But one of the great, and often misunderstood, lessons of deconstruction is that, far from undermining the grounds for inquiry, it is at its most interesting when applied to concrete decisions such as those demanded by the practice of oral history. Doing oral history, like doing activism, presents an endless array of practical challenges, including not just whom to interview and what to ask but, as I learned the hard way, where

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to do the interview and when to turn the tape recorder off. I quickly discovered that the material logistics of interviewing were not going to produce “evidence” that was in any way “transparent.” Despite my methodological hesitations, I was also intrigued by the radical potential for oral history to document lost histories and histories of loss. Both gay and lesbian history and activist history have ephemeral, unorthodox, and often suppressed archives, and in both cases, oral history can be a crucial tool for the preservation of history through memory. It can help create the public culture that turns what seems like idiosyncratic feeling into historical experience. I have been inspired by the model of ethnographic works such as Cherry Grove and Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, in which queer scholars such as Esther Newton and Madeline Davis and Liz Kennedy come to oral history as members of the communities they document and unabashedly acknowledge their personal investment in their material.20 Another compelling influence has been documentary film and in particular queer autoethnographies, including work by Jean Carlomusto, Gregg Bordowitz, Marlon Riggs, and Ellen Spiro, in which the documenter’s story enters the frame and in which the process of collecting and archiving is charged with affect.21 Thus, mixed in with my skepticism about oral history were curiosity and fascination. I was driven by the compulsion to document that is so frequently, I think, engendered by the ephemerality of queer communities and counterpublics; alongside the fierce conviction of how meaningful and palpable these alternative lifeworlds can be lies the fear that they will remain invisible or be lost. Oral history can capture something of the lived experience of participating in a counterpublic, offering, if nothing else, testimony to the fact that it existed. Often as ephemeral as the very cultures it seeks to document (since both tapes and transcripts are records of a live event that is past), oral history is loaded with emotional urgency and need.22 In this respect queer community histories share something with testimony, the genre that brings together trauma studies and oral history. Testimony has been viewed by some as an impossible genre, an attempt to represent the unrepresentable.23 Trauma poses limits and challenges for oral history, forcing consideration of how the interview process itself may be traumatically invasive or marked by forms of self-censorship and the work of the unconscious. Gay and lesbian oral histories, as forms of insider ethnography, have much to contribute to this project, including a sense of the complexity of gathering information about sexual intimacy that can be applied to the study of trauma’s emotional intimacies. I have wanted to see for myself how the process of testimony works by interviewing a group of people who, while they may not be trauma survivors themselves, have lived, as activists and as lesbians, in close proximity to a national trauma. My goal has been to use interviews to create political history as affective history, a

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history that captures activism’s felt, and even traumatic, dimensions. In forging a collective knowledge built on memory, I hope to produce not only a version of history but also an archive of emotions, which is one of trauma’s most important, but most difficult to preserve, legacies. Freighted with methodological, theoretical, and psychic baggage, the interview process was always both humbling and revelatory. The burden of intimacy, of encouraging people to talk about their emotional experience even when I didn’t know them especially well, was an ongoing challenge. The labor of sympathetic listening in order to facilitate someone else’s articulation of her experience was often exhausting, and I felt myself overwhelmed by all of the voices in my head. Even with the help of the protocols for gathering life histories, where the emphasis is on open-ended questions that enable interviewees to tell their stories as they see fit, I worried about being too invasive and about not representing people’s stories adequately, especially since I also had my own agendas and wanted the interviews to address my concerns. The actual labor and practice of interviewing has informed this project as much as the content of the interviews themselves has, giving me a healthy respect for the difficulty of gathering archives of testimony as well as a passionate conviction that they are valuable precisely because so ephemeral. THE A FFECTIV E PUBLIC CULTURE OF ACT UP

Almost unanimously, the women I interviewed stress the intensity and excitement of their response to ACT UP. Explaining her attraction, Amy Bauer says: “It was a very queer place. It was really queer, you know, to the core, and that was very appealing. I sort of instantaneously liked a lot of the people in it or felt at home in it.” Describing not only her initial response but also her ongoing involvement, Ann Northrop says: “I just fell in love, my first night in the room. . . . It was stunning to me to be able to walk into a room where I agreed with everyone there. That’s what has kept me there for eleven years now [fourteen years in 2002], because it’s the one place I can count on going and having an honest conversation with people whose values I share.” ACT UP’s camaraderie was central to its activism, and it fostered strong bonds between gay men and lesbians that gave substance to newly emerging notions of queer identities and politics. The women talk about going dancing in the clubs with the men after meetings, developing beloved friendships and even romances, and building rituals and traditions such as a queer Jewish seder; they describe a wide array of affective networks that underpin activism. Maxine Wolfe says, “It created a community more than simply a political group.” Although ACT UP’s formation of queer community is distinctive, a focus on its lesbian members also reveals very strong ties to histories of feminist

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organizing. The lesbians in ACT UP had a very crucial and visible role, disproportionate to their numbers, because so many of them came to ACT UP with previous political experience and contributed organizing skills. Ranging in age from early twenties to forties when they got involved in AIDS activism, they had experience with the civil rights movement and the antiwar movement, feminism and women’s reproductive health movements of the 1970s and 1980s, including the Feminist Women’s Health Collectives, Women’s Pentagon Action and the Seneca Peace Camp, the gay rights movement and the sex wars. Even younger women who were just out of college (a common trajectory for arriving in ACT UP and a sign of its class profile) often had experience with lesbian and gay organizations, divestment protests, and other kinds of campus activism. Some women first got involved with ACT UP because their specific skills led to invitations; Amy Bauer came to the first Wall Street protest in March 1987 because she knew how to organize a demonstration, and Jean Carlomusto was there because she could operate a video camera. In some cases, ACT UP provided an important respite from fractures within political communities, especially feminist ones. Kim Christensen, for example, had been ostracized by the lesbian community in Northampton in part because of her self-identification as bisexual. Maxine Wolfe and Sarah Schulman had been driven out of CARASA, a reproductive rights group, for homophobic reasons. And Amber Hollibaugh, one of the people outside ACT UP whom I interviewed, turned to AIDS activism in flight from the vehemence and bitterness of the feminist sex wars of the early 1980s. Almost unanimously, these experienced women comment on how dramatically ACT UP differed from other kinds of activism. After many years of working within leftist organizations, Maxine Wolfe was impressed with how ACT UP “cut an incredibly broad stripe across the lesbian and gay community in New York” and represented an unprecedented case of “organizing the unorganized.” She says, “I felt like I was organizing in there as well as outside of there. That it was an opportunity to open the minds of people who had their minds opened, and that anyone could stand up and say anything and if you had a good idea, people would do it.” Speaking about AIDS activism more generally, Amber Hollibaugh emphasizes how dramatically it challenged movement politics and changed the relation between insiders and outsiders: None of our movements had done the kind of work you ended up having to do in order to guarantee the most fundamental rights for someone who was getting sick. So it was really an extraordinary thing for me. It changed the way I understood activism. There’s no way that you have the privilege of just being an outsider when you’re fighting an epidemic. You can always be right when you’re in an outsider position. Your placard can always sound clever. Your chants can always sound correct. But when you’ve got to make sure that some-

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body gets bathed in a hospital, you’ve got to try to figure out how to maintain that radical position and how to get inside that hospital at the same time, so that when you’re not there, that person is still getting cleaned in a way that respects their dignity.

Although Hollibaugh did not find ACT UP to be a compelling arena for her own AIDS activism (in the 1980s she worked in the AIDS Discrimination Unit of the New York City Commission on Human Rights), her sentiments echo those of many of ACT UP’s members who come from long histories of political experience—that AIDS activism was an arena of tremendous possibility for them and that, rather than finding it wanting compared with other political causes or organizations, they are grateful for its lessons. If political experience and cultural capital made ACT UP a “powerful and volatile” organization (in Kim Christensen’s words), another important element in the mix was the urgency of illness and death. Like many of the men, a significant number of women mention coming to ACT UP out of the immediacy of emotional need. Their anecdotes tell a collective story about the importance of friendships between lesbians and gay men and those among artists, both of which occur within public cultures that frequently overlap in New York. David Wojnarowicz had been telling Zoe Leonard how exciting ACT UP was, and she came with him to a meeting on the same day that he told her he was HIV positive. Cynthia Schneider went with Todd Haynes, who was one of her best friends from Brown and with whom she had collaborated on the short film Superstar. Catherine (Saalfield) Gund came with Ray Navarro, who, along with Ellen Spiro and others who joined ACT UP, was her fellow student in the Whitney Program. Not to be underestimated, then, is the concrete power of a specific individual relationship to serve as an entrée into ACT UP. The result, according to Zoe Leonard, was an extremely diverse mix. I think there were some conscious efforts later to try to expand our vision and expand who felt comfortable in that room. That’s something I’m sure you’ve heard from a lot of people. A big problem with ACT UP was its racial and economic limitations. But I do think it gained from a certain kind of mix, where someone like me came into that room because I knew people who were dying. I had friends who were dying. I didn’t come into that room because I was involved in a certain college, and I didn’t come into that room because I was queer. I met people in that room who were older than me, younger than me, who had different backgrounds from me, because we had this one, other thing in common: that someone we knew or loved was either dead or dying of AIDS.

I would suggest that coming to ACT UP for political reasons and coming to ACT UP for personal reasons, to the extent that they are separable, were

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both equally important to the power of the organization. In the face of hostile questions, sometimes from other feminists, about why lesbians would be interested in AIDS activism, they entered a culture in which, as many suggest, the distinction between being HIV positive and HIV negative was often far more salient than differences in gender. Within the many stories lesbians tell about why they came to ACT UP are important insights about disidentifications with feminism, about the origins of queer social formations in friendships between gay men and lesbians that assumed public visibility in the AIDS crisis, and about the way a diversity of motives and resources strengthened the group. How did lesbians survive in ACT UP? Even if they had strong reasons for being there, it was not always easy. Says Alexis Danzig, “You had to have a taste for the rough and tumble of democratic process. This was not, strictly speaking, a feminist organization. Experienced, activist dykes taught by example and shared skills. It helped to be quick and witty and charismatic, and if you wanted to, you could stand in front of a room.” They were resilient and practical, or, as Amy Bauer says, “I don’t take things personally.” They were also strategic. As Maxine Wolfe describes it, the goal in operating with a feminist sensibility was not to monitor every instance of sexism: And other than a couple of the younger women, everyone else had experience already in the women’s movement, had experience already with people screaming at each other and knew it didn’t work. None of us were interested in making the men less sexist than they were by chastising them. We came in to work on AIDS, and we would work on any issues that there were, and we were interested if there were ways of raising issues about women, but it wasn’t the only thing. We made a very conscious, collective statement to each other. We all had the same view, which was that some men in the room were misogynists—you were never going to change them. Some of them seemed to be really feminists and would be on our side. And the vast majority were badly trained. We were grown-up about it. We knew what bad training was because that’s what we learned from lesbian feminism. We’re all badly trained. You know? So, actually, that group of women had an incredible impact on the group, because when someone would get up and say, “Let’s man the tables,” we would just say, “Staff,” and then everybody started saying “Staff” at the table. We didn’t say, “You sexist pig.”

Amy Bauer also talks about using her training in nonviolence and her experience with consensus-based groups to negotiate conflicts in meetings. Coming to ACT UP with both positive and negative experiences of feminist styles of processing, the women frequently mention that they appreciated ACT UP’s efficient emphasis on action and concrete proposals. Another important mode of survival was bonding together. The pragmatic approach that Maxine Wolfe describes above emerged from another

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of her important ideas—the hosting of “dyke dinners” for the lesbians in ACT UP to socialize. As she puts it: I had learned long before then that the only way to exist in that kind of situation is to connect with other lesbians. So I started having these dyke dinners, and I invited lesbians who were there, and over the next couple of months we invited any lesbian who walked in the door. We ended up with a group of about, I guess, eight or nine lesbians. And it was really important because the first thing we talked about, the very first dyke dinner we had, was why are we in this group? Why, as lesbians, are we working on AIDS?

And as Jean Carlomusto says: AIDS is why I came to ACT UP, but the reason I stayed was lesbians. The reason I stayed was because the lesbians got organized. It could sustain you through the burnout of organizing—this incredible social net that was very sustaining or nurturing. . . . These dyke dinners were great because you not only socialized but talked about things that were coming up. They were really important in getting people together. . . . I think they [the women] wanted to form an agenda but the first step was to get to know each other.

These comments about dyke dinners suggest the powerful role of friendship in creating a political organization—activist bonds are not distinct from other kinds of relationships. Thus, although ACT UP’s famous reputation as a cruising ground and a social scene is sometimes cast as obscuring its political activities, I would suggest that the gay men’s cruising and its counterpart in the dyke dinners serve as the foundation of its power. Eventually the dyke dinners provided the organizational energy for the first demonstration to focus specifically on a women’s issue—the January 1988 demonstration against Cosmopolitan magazine, in which ACT UP protested an article arguing that heterosexual women were not at risk from AIDS through vaginal penetration. This action was supported by the men in ACT UP and gave the women increased visibility as a constituency. If friendships and affective networks were a crucial source of ACT UP’s power, they were a very volatile source of power, although no more volatile than the desires and investments that underpin any relationship. References to high school figure prominently in people’s representations of ACT UP as a social milieu in which some people were “in” and some people were “out.” Says Cynthia Schneider, “I always had such mixed feelings about it, and I think I did at the time. The whole ACT UP scene was such a ‘star culture.’ It was so much like, ‘Who’s been out there and who’s performing for the whole group?’ . . . There were certain people who were so much trying to get attention.” Amy Bauer mentions that ACT UP had an “A-list,” and Catherine (Saalfield) Gund describes talking to men for whom ACT UP was reminiscent of high school because they felt left out of the cool

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crowd (although she thinks it was different for women, because they were already to some extent outsiders). Alisa Lebow, one of the people whom I interviewed who was not an ACT UP member but instead worked for the NYC Commission on Human Rights, expresses her problems with ACT UP’s social scene: What I was not able to swallow in the few ACT UP meetings I went to were the kind of group dynamics and the cliquishness. It felt a lot like college. It felt a lot like a lot of really cute boys and girls who thought they were being really hip, mostly upper-middle-class and white, and it was as much a party as it was politics. And while I don’t object to partying and politicking, at the same time it just was not for me.

Yet at the same time, these intensities also produce very profound friendships. Says Zoe Leonard: “I have so much fondness and respect for the people I worked with in ACT UP. I feel like there’s something really special when I run into them. I don’t know. It’s not like going to school together. It’s something else. You took a stand with this person. It’s knowing that in some very, very important way you shared at least some basic values with this person.” Viewed from the “minority” position of its lesbian and women members, ACT UP emerges as more complex and diverse than it might otherwise appear to be and as a group whose members are well aware of its possible limitations. For example, the reasons for tensions between men and women in ACT UP were very perceptively analyzed by Kim Christensen, who suggests that ACT UP was an interesting coalition not just across gender but also across class lines, in which women with political experience collaborated with men who had access to cultural and economic resources. I think what made ACT UP both powerful and eventually what made it fall apart was that it was the coming together of men of predominantly one class background and women of predominantly lower-class backgrounds—not lowclass backgrounds, not like where some of us were coming from. But a lot of the men in ACT UP were coming from what I would call at least PMC (professional managerial) and sometimes higher. . . . They had access to people, to resources, to media outlets. . . . But it’s also then combined—and this is what I think made it both powerful and volatile—combined with a lot of people, predominantly women and some men of color, who were not from that class background but who had the political skills that these white guys needed. They knew how to put out a press release, but they didn’t know how to organize a demonstration. Peter Staley organize a demonstration? Please. He couldn’t have done it to save his damn life, literally. I think what made it work so well was that those of us from the political backgrounds brought those skills. But we could not call the New York Times the way that Larry Kramer could. But Larry could make the phone call, and we could be kicking his ass to tell him what to say. I think that’s what made it actually work for as long

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as it did. . . . A lot of things that in retrospect were very much about class looked like they were just about gender and got fought out in terms of gender. . . . I think the intersection of class and gender in that organization was complicated, very complicated, and often kind of subterranean.

While offering a critical appraisal of the men’s privilege, Christensen also appreciates their cultural access in constituting ACT UP as what she calls a “very uneasy coalition.” She is not alone in articulating a critique of ACT UP’s class and gender politics from within, a critique, however, that can see the group’s tensions and precariousness as part of its power. Not only does gender become more complicated when linked to class, but class is also a nuanced category. Christensen draws distinctions within middle-class identities to articulate the differences between the men and women, since even if they were of “predominantly lower-class backgrounds” than the men, many women had middle-class jobs and the cultural capital that comes with being college graduates, artists, and writers. Like the distinctions between being “in” and being “out,” these finely drawn differences suggest the complexity of affinities within political groups, affinities that are as refined as personal tastes and sensibilities. These “queer” affections produced unusual forms of fierce love and bonding but also points of conflict and distress, which have also been the subject of my investigation.

POLITICAL CONFLICT AND OR AL HISTORY’S SILENCES

Even as they offer very vivid records of activism, the interviews often document the affective networks that underlie the political process only in very ephemeral ways. What Jean Carlomusto describes as “the two major issues we dealt with in the AIDS activist movement—sex and death” have proven to be somewhat elusive in these documents, talked of less than I would have liked or expected. Even when I explicitly asked about friendships, romances, and affective relationships, the comments were often very general. Jean Carlomusto said, “So you want to know who was hot for who and how that brought them into the group?” and we laughed. It’s a delicate issue, but a historical record of, for example, relationships between lesbians and gay men is important for understanding issues such as queer identity formations and the debates about lesbian transmission of HIV. It’s not just that people were reticent to share information that might seem too personal or gossipy, especially if critical of others; despite my declared desire to blur the boundaries between the political and the personal, I found myself reluctant to ask questions that might seem invasive. This was another case in which practice complicates the best of theoretical intentions. Sometimes the best moments are off the record, popping up in the more casual remarks that people make when the tape recorder is not

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on. I become the bearer of information that I’m not sure I can pass on without violating the trust of those I’ve interviewed.24 This sense of propriety is a subtle thing, not always the result of an explicit request not to be quoted publicly; it also comes from my own qualms about how to translate nuance into a more public context in a responsible and accurate way. The intimacy of the interview as a live transaction doesn’t always emerge in the transcript, especially when excised for quotation. I’ve been using intimacy to track intimacy, but the results don’t always appear in the document; they’re preserved impressionistically in the densely overdetermined encounter of the interview. Ultimately, the interviews sometimes serve as documents of emotion not because of what they do say but because of what they don’t say. The conflicts generated by political differences are as difficult to document as activist friendships and romances. One especially volatile issue was lesbian HIV transmission, which sometimes found lesbians pitted against one another rather than collectively galvanized by an issue that spoke directly to their concerns. While some members of ACT UP felt that the risk of HIV transmission between lesbians (through sexual contact) was negligible and that focus on this issue was a waste of energy, others felt that it was an important way to address lesbian invisibility within the AIDS crisis. One of the most vociferous opponents of the latter strategy, Sarah Schulman, argues that attention to lesbian HIV transmission was a cover for the AIDS hysteria within ACT UP generated by the “queer” sexual relationships between lesbians and gay men. Despite such skepticism, lobbying around the issue of lesbians and HIV ultimately led to the creation of the Lesbian AIDS Project at GMHC in 1991, with Amber Hollibaugh as the first director. Yet, this “success” was also fraught with dissent about whether GMHC, which had been an ongoing target of activist suspicion, was the appropriate home for such an organization. Writing about this history is difficult, because much of it is fraught with personal differences and battles; expectations and disappointments run high when lesbians are working on issues very close to home or when there is internal dissent. An equally contentious flashpoint within ACT UP was the 076 clinical trials that tested pregnant women for the effects of AZT on perinatal transmission of HIV; it came up in several interviews as a tense moment in which the status of women’s issues within ACT UP was at stake. Some were opposed to the trials on the grounds that they treated pregnant women as vectors; there were also objections to the use of a control group on the grounds that it was unfair to women who wanted access through the trials to what might be life-saving treatment. Other women felt that opposition to the trials was ill-advised and that it might be possible to lobby for improvements without rejecting them out of hand.25 This debate reflected

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already existing tensions within ACT UP between working on the inside and working on the outside, between negotiating with government officials and engaging in direct action. During this period, ACT UP’s Treatment and Data Committee was acquiring the increasing power and independence that eventually led it to split off to become the Treatment Action Group (TAG). Meanwhile, the call for greater attention to women and HIV had coalesced by 1990 and 1991 into a push to change the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) definition of AIDS to include opportunistic infections that affect women. (There was a major demonstration at the CDC in Atlanta in December 1990.) One of the critical moments in ACT UP’s history occurred when the CDC Working Group proposed a moratorium on all negotiation with government officials for six months until the definition was changed. The 076 trials and the call for a moratorium were both issues that did not produce a unified front among women in ACT UP, who had differences of opinion about strategy and especially about how far to go in pressuring other ACT UP members and groups. The interviews show a range of attempts to explain a contentious moment in ACT UP’s history, particularly around women’s issues and participation: A lot of the women who came in then would literally do what the men were doing then, which was to get up on the floor and say to you, “If you don’t support this action, you’re a sexist. How dare you question our point of view? We can’t have a dialogue about this, you just have to follow it.” At the same time, the people on Treatment and Data were doing the same thing. So the two weren’t unconnected in terms of where the organization was at that moment. But I can remember Larry Kramer and I both sitting down and trying to get those two sides together, because we still had the view that that was the way things got done in ACT UP, which was to figure out what was the common ground between people that was not below its common denominator. . . . But the women who came in then were women who had, really, an “us or nothing” kind of attitude. (Maxine Wolfe) I have to say I had very mixed feelings about the whole thing, because I totally agreed with Maxine and Heidi and Tracy that these trials were horrendous, that they should be stopped. I also had—I guess just from many years of political experience—I had a sense in my gut that the guys were not going to give on this one and that if the women were persisting in this demand that it was going to split the group because . . . it was the class/gender thing again. . . . I remember feeling horrible during that meeting, because it was like watching a train come at you and knowing that this is going to split the group. And the women were right. But on the other hand I was very reluctant to watch this train, because I knew that when we lost those guys we were going to lose access and we were going to lose the privileges that class had given

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them. And I thought that was a dangerous move. And I think I was right. (Kim Christensen) I thought it was an ultraleft position, actually, because it just meant any moratorium on meetings with government officials. Then it didn’t deconstruct the quality or the character of the meetings that were happening or that could happen, or who was at the meetings, or whom did we want to send to the meetings, or how did you get access to the meetings? So I didn’t agree with it, and I spoke against it. I was part of the Governor’s Advisory Council in New Jersey. I was arguing with the Department of Health all the time, and I was trying to get government to do the right thing. I felt like if I was doing a good job. When the head of the AIDS division of the Department of Health would say, “Uh oh, here comes Marion,” then I knew I was doing a good job. Right? When he would start out a meeting saying, “Okay, Marion’s here. I guess we’re going to have to hear about blah, blah, blah,” then, okay. I’m doing a good job. So I had a slightly different perspective on it. I didn’t think that you automatically had to get co-opted. I think you could have a struggle about that, and fight co-optation, instead of just succumb. I also thought it was an incredibly classist position to write off all these workers, in AIDS, rather than try to recruit them to be AIDS activists in their place of work. Not everybody had the luxury to be an AIDS activist, and have another job, so if we wanted to try to fight co-optation it was in our own interests to organize workers in AIDS. So that’s what my position was on it. (Marion Banzhaf) So I would say that the moratorium didn’t splinter the organization, but that, rather, it represented a preexisting schism within it. I think I was like, “Here, let’s put a label on it.” But by the time the vote came to the floor of ACT UP, I remember thinking that it was beside the point—the damage was so done, the divisions so clear. I remember thinking, “Even I don’t want to vote on this.” . . . I had been observing the group, where it was going, and I was like, “This is never going to fly. People don’t want this. Some people do, but most people don’t. And I just have to decide, do I want to stick around in an organization that I think is really shooting itself in the foot?” And the answer was no. Like, no way. After the vote, it was really no longer safe for me to be in that organization—talk about traumatic. I loved working in that organization. I had gotten so much out of it. I definitely had different ideas about things than some people, but once I knew I had allowed myself to become a lightning rod, I knew I just had to shut the fuck up. There was no way for me to speak there anymore. I became somebody who you couldn’t really—like an untouchable. (Tracy Morgan) Tracy became a real lightning rod for people’s suspicions about that idea [the moratorium]. . . . Tracy, because she’s the person who put it forward, became the focus of a lot of animosity. That animosity, in part, and all of this tension, really was, for me, like a loss of innocence about the organization and about my relationship to it and my relationship to other people. I felt like this was my home, and it was suddenly becoming a dysfunctional family. It was becom-

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ing the thing I ran away from when I came to ACT UP, and I was really devastated. The disintegration of ACT UP was really painful. I feel like I was depressed for a lot of years. I’m kind of a depressive person, but I would argue that I was really depressed. Because I lost—a lot. I’m not saying I lost more than anyone else lost, but I personally lost a lot. I lost a home. . . . It was my intimacy. That’s where I had all of my friends. . . . It was my identity. (Heidi Dorow)

I’m inclined to let these quotations speak for themselves, because it seems risky to comment on their convergences and tensions without getting caught up in adjudicating between who’s right and who’s wrong. If, as Kim Christensen puts it, the call for a moratorium was “a morally right move” but one that would have “grave political and personal consequences,” such assessments are bound to be simplistic. Sorting through these recollections is complicated because of reactions to Tracy Morgan’s combative style; she was personally targeted, scapegoated even, as a troublemaker in the context of conflicts within ACT UP that actually exceeded individual personalities and differences. The disagreement with Tracy was pronounced enough that people specifically named her, as well as Heidi Dorow; this was unusual in the interviews where personal disagreements were more frequently described in vague or veiled terms. I felt it important to seek out both Heidi and Tracy, because I didn’t feel comfortable telling the story of the moratorium without their input. If anything, the stories are actually quite consistent despite the political differences. Maxine Wolfe’s description of the women who came into ACT UP at a later stage is corroborated by Tracy’s account of herself as a feminist who didn’t understand how the lesbians in ACT UP could be interested in working with the men. Although she was opposed to it, Maxine actually presented Tracy’s plan for a moratorium on the ACT UP meeting floor, because she wanted the tensions created by rumors about it to be confronted directly. She hoped that it would be quickly defeated (as it was), but, as she notes, the deeper conflicts remained: “The damage had already been done, in that the Treatment and Data people became more and more nasty re any of the women’s stuff. I think it’s possible that would have happened anyway sooner or later, because they were moving more and more to the ‘inside’ and the women’s stuff was still on the ‘outside.’ ”26 Marion Banzhaf’s opposition to the moratorium is particularly pronounced, because by then she had largely left ACT UP for her work as director of the New Jersey Women’s and AIDS Network (NJWAN), and she had also been very upset by ACT UP’s disruption of a meeting to discuss the 076 clinical trials, making it impossible to argue for the improvements to the clinical trials that she had worked so hard to get. Her comments from outside ACT UP, however, echo the sentiments of many women inside

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ACT UP. But more than sorting out the details of who was on which side of the issue, I tell the story of the moratorium as evidence of how difficult it can be to document political conflict. Although I was often encouraged to be a tougher or more aggressive interviewer, it was ultimately important to me not to have an adversarial relationship with my interviewees and to listen for the stories they wanted to tell. For both Tracy and Heidi, the pain of losing ACT UP and their attempts to understand why their actions were seen as divisive are important parts of their stories. In pursuing the history of the moratorium, I gained an appreciation for why the interpersonal and affective dynamics that accompany political conflicts might not emerge in an interview. The interviews and my own account of them contain silences or evasions that mark these difficult histories. My decision to write about conflicts within ACT UP has been a difficult one, pervaded by the fear of “airing dirty laundry” and creating a picture of ACT UP that detracts from its many accomplishments. I take inspiration, however, from Amber Hollibaugh, who recognizes the powerful dynamics of shame within political movements. In listening to her talk about her “dangerous desires,” I became convinced that documenting sexual politics is an especially valuable resource for understanding the dynamics of activist conflict.27 I was eager to interview Hollibaugh, not only to get a sense of her work with two projects outside ACT UP, the AIDS Discrimination Unit of the New York City Commission on Human Rights in the 1980s and the Lesbian AIDS Project at GMHC in the 1990s, but also because I was curious about the connection between her earlier history with the sex wars and her subsequent move to AIDS activism. Hollibaugh is no stranger to a feeling of being “uncomfortable” in political organizations. She cites many experiences—as a lesbian within leftist and antiwar politics, as a high femme in gay-lesbian movements of the 1970s, as working-class and as a sex radical in feminist movements of the early 1980s—of being an outsider within her own movement. She describes how the sex wars brought her to AIDS activism, as “the one place I could figure out where my activism, my sexual politics, and my understanding of class and gender and race would be valued contributions rather than making me ‘other,’ and to be isolated and stayed away from.” Hollibaugh speaks very passionately about the terrible consequences of movements that ostracize and shame people, and, when I asked her about whether sexual desires and identities are particularly prone to such dynamics, she responded by making an important statement about the links between sexual desire and activism: Around sexuality, I think people believe very quickly that they’re deviant, and that they’re not part of a collective experience that they can use to buffer some of the impact of criticism. So when you say to somebody, “There’s something wrong with you. There’s something deviant or perverse about your de-

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sires,” it’s the loneliest, most dangerous, and most vulnerable place, and the place I think people are least able to resist and come to terms with themselves and still be open about their own issues. . . . I think the loneliness of that early sex radical politics was exactly—I think we were brave there in a way that was different than other kinds of slights and humiliations that come in political movements, which I think aren’t good. But around sexuality I think people are more vulnerable, more isolatable, and more prone to believe that they are in the wrong. Being a sexual minority in your own movement is a very uncomfortable position. I’ve been out now as a high femme for twenty years almost, and this is not a point of pleasure for me. It’s given me great pleasure, but it’s an extraordinarily difficult place to defend. . . . It’s very hard to hold out for the right to be profoundly sexual; to hold out for your own desires; to figure out what they mean and claim them, when they even seem a little dicey to you. It’s not gay pride.

Closely connected to sexuality are feelings of belonging and vulnerability that are fundamental to political organizing. Hollibaugh’s comments name humiliation and shame as problems for political movements, which can purport to embrace freedom while making people fearful of articulating their most deeply held desires and feelings. They help explain why my interviews might contain only fleeting hints of very personal experiences of both love and death, and especially those experiences where one has felt most isolated or alone. Included in this category are political conflicts that can also leave people feeling isolated by the convictions that are most dear to them. Hollibaugh says, “Our refusal to take on sex is one of the fundamental reasons we have not created a larger movement, because we refuse to incorporate the dynamic of danger and vulnerability and sexuality into our organizing, and that is what sex represents in most people’s eyes. It’s the thing that they either never have or that they lose everything in order to have.” Her comments suggest that one of the important contributions of sexual politics can be models of organizing that are more attentive to the dynamics of shame and isolation that complicate activism. My interest in using oral history to investigate the affective complexity of activism is aimed at complementing Hollibaugh’s call for new forms of political organizing that can do justice to sexuality and, by implication, emotion. Even when the interviews point to places where things cannot be said or articulated, they are a way into an understanding of activism that can accommodate the full range of its affects, including not just its camaraderie and righteous indignation but also its ambivalences and disagreements. ACTIVISM’S A FTERLIV ES

[I taught a] gay studies class last semester for a friend of mine, about ACT UP, and these were 90 percent young, out, gay lesbian people, and a good

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percent had never heard of ACT UP—those who had had very bizarre notions about what we had done, and it was really depressing. It was like, Oh, my God, this was only ten years ago, and it’s already gone from the public memory. It was like, something has to happen here, because they can’t reinvent the wheel every single generation. (Kim Christensen) We didn’t even realize what we had created. We certainly didn’t realize how ephemeral it was, because at a certain point many of us, for completely different reasons—or, for many of the same reasons, but for our own individual reasons—started leaving. And all of a sudden, this friendship network and place that we would absolutely be every Monday night—these knowns in our lives—weren’t there anymore. . . . There were lots of different reasons for leaving. But I remember there was a moment when Jean and I were looking back and saying, “Wow, that was really something.” We really had created, out of nothing but willpower, this very, very special movement that had been home for many of us for a very long time. (Alexis Danzig) Someone once said to me that the natural life span for any group like this was three years at most. So the fact that after four or five years people started leaving seems to me a tribute, not a negative. . . . I think ACT UP was phenomenally successful. Phenomenally. (Ann Northrop) One of the things we really were into in ACT UP was skill sharing—the idea that anybody could speak to the media, and how do you do that? Everyone gets marshal trained. Lots of people do marshal CD [civil disobedience], and go through CD training. Lots of people do CD. That’s an experience that most people don’t have, and it’s a transformative experience. People take that with them wherever they go, whether they work in other AIDS service organizations or go back to school and do something—get their MSW, go to law school, or whatever. (Amy Bauer) There was a phrase from Tony Molinari’s rap song he did for the NIH, which was, “If you don’t like something, change it.” I think one of the reasons why people don’t organize more now is because—I see in my students this sense of cynicism and hopelessness, like, “Oh, we could never do anything about it.” And I’m like, “Yes, we didn’t end the AIDS epidemic, but damn it, we changed the clinical trials process. . . . We changed the friggin’ definition of AIDS. Right? Two demos at the CDC—whoops. Definition is changed. It’s not that hard, if you just get your butts going. You can accomplish really amazing things.” . . . And this harks back to the ’60s. We ended Vietnam, but we didn’t end imperialism. Well, we ended Vietnam, damn it. That’s worth something. And legal segregation is over. It’s not the end of oppression but it means something. (Kim Christensen) I think for all the ways in which the movement fell short of what we really wanted, and for all the people that we lost, and for all the things we would like to have changed that we didn’t manage to change, I think that ACT UP really changed the way we live our lives today. I think it changed the way people think about AIDS and about health care. I think it opened up the whole discussion of health care in this country. And it opened up the whole

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discussion of sexuality and sexual identity in this country. And I think it also permanently opened a door where many people, millions of people, were able to see the links between different minorities and different, struggling groups of people. (Zoe Leonard) To have a legacy is like a present. I think of Ray [Navarro] a lot as a reference for my ideas and experiences. I think about what he might have done in the same situation, where he might have gone with something, how he might have formulated a joke while walking down the street or watching a bad movie. And I do feel sad that he didn’t get to work with his ideas for too long, that he didn’t get to work them out. In hindsight, I can see that he was just getting started. I can appreciate the privilege of imagining what I want to make of my life and then getting to try out some of those fantasies for real. And there’s times I wish it was him who was saying what he had done and not me imagining it. (Catherine [Saalfield] Gund)

At the outset of my inquiry, I was drawn to the idea that activism is not only a response to trauma but can itself be traumatic because of its emotional intensities and disappointments. Activism has its own losses that need to be mourned, and it can also give rise to the melancholy of incomplete mourning. Moreover, because the passage of time can bring backlashes or persistent problems that make one’s activism seem in hindsight less effective, activism is always retroactively subject to such emotions. The interviews have ultimately challenged my thinking, however; as the above comments reveal, no matter how difficult their experience with ACT UP might have been, everyone can remember something important that remains, and they are emphatic about ACT UP’s transformative power. When I have discussed my project’s connections with trauma, some of the women I interviewed have been extremely wary, concerned about the pathologizing implications of describing their experiences as traumatizing and insistent on their activism as a way of moving beyond or warding off trauma. Or as Kim Christensen puts it: “It’s funny because people think movements happen when there is despair, but they don’t happen when there’s despair; they happen when there’s hope.” This much is clear, not only from the comments that people make about why ACT UP mattered, but also in the work they do that emerges from their experiences, whether it’s being a lawyer doing AIDS work, a life-long activist, a writer, or a videomaker. Because Jean Carlomusto’s comments in Gregg Bordowitz’s video Fast Trip, Long Drop, about how activist footage shifts over time from representing resistance to producing mourning, were such an inspiration for this project, I was particularly eager to get her thoughts about the combined memories of activism and death. Now she worries about ACT UP’s visual history being “used as wallpaper. Whenever you want to talk about activism, just throw in some protest footage, even if it’s not about the action you’re referring to.” She describes her struggle, in the period following her in-

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volvement with ACT UP, to live with the experience of mortality and how that has led to her renewed interest in history and archives. That’s actually a very difficult thing to come by—recognizing the fleeting nature, the constantly changing nature, of life. It almost sounds trite, but it’s an incredibly profound part, for me, of acclimating to life, now. I had a very tough period of time where I almost didn’t go out for a year. A lot of different things played into that, but a lot of it was this struggle with mortality. Michael Callen wrote this song, “We Are Living in Wartime,” and the song is describing the experience that only people who survive, I guess, epidemics or natural disasters or wars are familiar with—where in such a short period of time you lose a whole part of your community of friends. All of a sudden people are gone from your life. . . . I’m not advocating living like a hermit as a way of dealing with this. It’s just a phase I had gone through. In a way, I think, also part of my way of dealing with this loss related to activist work, was also somewhat activist in nature. Getting more involved with the Lesbian Herstory Archives—I really became interested in archives, and I think part of that is related to a more mature attitude toward history. I think there was a kind of mentality for those of us who were twenty-somethings during the AIDS activist movement, who believed there was nothing like this moment. This was truly mind-blowing what we were doing—and it was. But in the wake of the loss of that, I also began really culling or nurturing an appreciation for not just my history but just the historical artifact.

Carlomusto is one of many women I interviewed whose ongoing projects continue to engage with AIDS, and especially with death and loss. Just as video made possible a new kind of activist documentation, so too is it producing new ways of documenting activist memory. Carlomusto talks about the importance of having her archive, now easily accessible on a desktop computer, around her on a daily basis. She is working on a project in collaboration with Jane Rosett, called AIDS: A Living Archive, which will consist of a number of installation pieces designed to mobilize their combined archive of video and photographs to reflect on history and to bring the past into the present.28 She says, “I just feel like it’s vitally important to have access to these archives, because when I go through them they constantly give me a new approach to the present.” For her, a readily accessible video archive “starts to break down the boundaries between space and time, so that past and present—well, at least the past, is just so accessible, and able to be drawn into one’s work.” What can these memories of AIDS activism tell us about the intersections of trauma theory and queer theory? In Femininity Played Straight, Biddy Martin uses a story of mourning and trauma as the vehicle for a critique of queer theory. She describes her “hesitations about theories that elevate

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radical detachment, anti-societalization, and transgression to the level of a reactive sublime,” and she attempts to delineate her “belief in the importance of something as simple and basic as attachment, investment, even love.”29 In addition to articulating this claim theoretically, she makes it through an account of the death of her (straight) brother and her own grieving for him. She also makes use of the model provided by Peggy Phelan’s account of Silverlake Life, in which Phelan uses the story of a gay man’s documentation of his lover’s death from AIDS to create a space for her own (specifically lesbian) fantasy and grief. Crucial to Phelan’s argument is the claim that lesbians and gay men have a stronger relation to the death drive because of their experiences of the social death of homophobia.30 Martin agrees but also finds in Phelan’s account room for an understanding of trauma that does not assume “an absolutely originary and constitutive violence to which all other traumas could be assimilated, nor any assumption that all agency can be reduced to compulsive repetition.”31 Thus in addition to articulating the relation between trauma and attachment as a critique of queer theory, Martin also implicitly offers here a critique of approaches to trauma that have a tendency to assimilate all traumas to an epistemological structure of unknowability. One such approach is Caruth’s model of “unclaimed experience,” in which trauma is marked by its temporal belatedness, its failure to leave traces by which it could be directly represented and remembered.32 Martin holds out for the specificity of individual trauma stories as a guard against the presumptions of rigid normative and antinormative binarisms; in the same vein, this essay insists on the idiosyncracies of activist life that are illuminated by oral history. This archive of activist interviews also offers a challenge to the critique of trauma culture currently prevalent in cultural studies. I’m thinking of texts such as Mark Seltzer’s Serial Killers, in which he refers disparagingly to our contemporary “wound culture” that is obsessed with displaying its traumas, Wendy Brown’s “Wounded Attachments,” in which she critiques identity politics for its construction of oppression as victimization, and Lauren Berlant’s analysis of a national sentimentality that represents citizens as traumatized subjects.33 Legitimate as these accounts might be within their contexts of analysis, a very different trauma culture emerges from the scene of AIDS activism, one that is not about spectacles of wounded helplessness but about trauma as the provocation to create alternative lifeworlds. The oral histories of AIDS activists propose new ways of representing and countering trauma, modes of response that do not oppose militancy to mourning but instead glimpse within the material specificities of queer intimacy and love the structures of feeling that can build new political cultures.

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I’d like to thank all of the women I’ve interviewed, including not just those listed below who are cited in this article, but also Marina Alvarez, Anne D’Adesky, Maria Maggenti, Jane Rosett, Sarah Schulman, and Polly Thistlethwaite. Their generosity has been a precious gift, their intelligence a welcome challenge, and their passionate activism an inspiration. Amy Bauer, New York, N.Y., January 19, 2000. Marion Banzhaf, New York, N.Y., April 10, 2000. Jean Carlomusto, New York, N.Y., May 28, 1997 and January 31, 2000. Kim Christensen, Purchase, N.Y. (by phone), January 27, 2000. Alexis Danzig, San Francisco, Calif., July 23, 1997. Heidi Dorow, New York, N.Y., June 15, 2000. Catherine (Saalfield) Gund, New York, N.Y., November 3, 1997. Amber Hollibaugh, New York, N.Y., October 23, 1999, January 24, 2000, and April 24, 2000. Alisa Lebow, New York, N.Y., June 1, 1998. Zoe Leonard, New York, N.Y., January 20, 2000. Tracy Morgan, New York, N.Y., June 23, 2000. Ann Northrop, New York, N.Y., May 28, 1998. Cynthia Schneider, New York, N.Y., December 21, 1999. Maxine Wolfe, Brooklyn, N.Y., May 30, 1997. 1. See Ann Cvetkovich, Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992). 2. Lauren Berlant, “Poor Eliza,” American Literature 70, no. 3 (September 1998): 657. 3. The DIVA-TV (Damned Interfering Video Activists) collective made Target City Hall (1989), Pride (1989), and Like a Prayer (1991). The 1989 compilation Video against AIDS (1990, distributed by Video Databank, School of the Art Institute, 280 South Columbus, Chicago, Ill. 60603) includes many important videos from this period, including Testing the Limits (1987) and segments of GMHC’s Living with AIDS series, which was coproduced by Gregg Bordowitz and Jean Carlomusto. For a graphics archive and an account of major ACT UP demonstrations between 1987 and 1990, see Douglas Crimp with Adam Rolston, AIDS DemoGraphics (Seattle: Bay Press, 1990). (Indicative, though, of the danger of losing access to ACT UP’s history is the fact that this important book is out of print.) An important guide to AIDS activist videos is Alexandra Juhacz, AIDS TV: Identity, Community, and Alternative Video (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), which includes an annotated videography by Catherine Saalfield. Many of these videos are included in the Royal S. Marks Collection in the New York Public Library, which was assembled with support from the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS.

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4. See the ACT UP/NY Women and AIDS Book Group, Women, AIDS, and Activism (Boston: South End Press, 1990). Doctors, Liars, and Women is available on the Video against AIDS compilation. For a discussion of these works and other AIDS activist videos, see Ann Cvetkovich, “AIDS and Video Activism,” Art, Activism, and Oppositionality: Essays from Afterimage, ed. Grant Kester (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 182–98. On women and AIDS activism, as well as Doctors, Liars, and Women, see Paula A. Treichler, “Beyond Cosmo: AIDS, Identity, and Inscriptions of Gender,” in How to Have Theory in an Epidemic: Cultural Chronicles of AIDS (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 235–77. 5. See, for example, Peter F. Cohen, Love and Anger: Essays on AIDS, Activism, and Politics (New York: Harrington Park Press, 1998). 6. Carlomusto’s quotation is taken from my interview with her. See the list at the end of the essay. All other unreferenced quotations in my essay also come from these interviews. 7. See Sarah Schulman, People in Trouble (New York: Plume, 1990), and Rat Bohemia (New York: Dutton, 1995); Ellen Spiro, DiAna’s Hair Ego (1989), Greetings from Out Here (1993), and Roam Sweet Home (1996); Zoe Leonard, Strange Fruit, catalog (New York: Paula Cooper Gallery, 1995), and Secession (Vienna: Wiener Secession, 1997). Other examples include Catherine (Saalfield) Gund’s video work, including the Positive: Life with HIV (1995) television series, and Hallelujah! The Ron Athey Story (1997); and Jean Carlomusto’s videos To Catch a Glimpse (1997), and Shatzi Is Dying (2000). 8. The files of ACT UP/New York are now cataloged and available in the manuscript collections of the New York Public Library. 9. See Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming). 10. See Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). 11. See Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); and Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 12. Cathy Caruth and Thomas Keenan, “The AIDS Crisis Is Not Over: A Conversation with Gregg Bordowitz, Douglas Crimp, and Laura Pinsky,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Caruth, 256–71. 13. Douglas Crimp, “Mourning and Militancy,” October 51 (winter 1989): 3–18. 14. See Simon Watney, Policing Desire, 2d ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 7–8; and David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration (New York: Vintage, 1991), 121–22. 15. See Laura S. Brown, “Not Outside the Range: One Feminist Perspective on Psychic Trauma,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Caruth, 100–112. 16. This was part of the language used to describe the symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, in the 1980 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III), published by the American Psychological Association, but it was subsequently removed from the 1994 DSM-IV in part because of this problem. For an overview of the history of the diagnosis, see Allan Young, The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).

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17. See Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), especially: 14–15, and “Conclusion: ActingOut and Working-Through,” 205–23. 18. See Joan Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David Halperin (New York: Routledge, 1993), 397–415. 19. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson (ChampaignUrbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313. 20. See Esther Newton, Cherry Grove, Fire Island: Sixty Years in America’s First Gay and Lesbian Town (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993); and Madeline D. Davis and Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (New York: Routledge, 1992). 21. See, for example, Jean Carlomusto, To Catch a Glimpse (1997), and Shatzi Is Dying (2000); Gregg Bordowitz, Fast Trip, Long Drop (1994); Marlon Riggs, Tongues Untied (1989), and Black Is, Black Ain’t (1994); Ellen Spiro, Greetings from Out Here (1993). 22. My sense of the ephemerality of oral history is informed by work in performance studies that focuses on the difficulty of archiving live events; the oral history interview can usefully be understood on the model of performance. See, for example, Peggy Phelan, Unmarked (New York: Routledge, 1993). On the combined ephemerality of queer cultures and performance, see José Esteban Muñoz, “Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts,” Women and Performance 8, no. 2 (1996): 5–16. 23. See Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992); and Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). 24. On the issue of betrayal in ethnography, see Kamala Visweswaran, Fictions of Feminist Ethnography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). 25. In retrospect, the 076 trials were enormously useful in developing treatment specific to women, since it has ultimately been proven that AZT is useful for reducing perinatal transmission in pregnant women with HIV. 26. Maxine Wolfe, correspondence, September 3, 2001. 27. See Hollibaugh’s essays and interviews, recently collected as My Dangerous Desires: A Queer Girl Dreaming Her Way Home (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). 28. Jean Carlomusto and Jane Rosett curated an exhibit called AIDS: A Living Archive in 2001 at the Museum of the City of New York to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of GMHC. The exhibit incorporated parts of this ongoing project, including an AIDS timeline and the interactive “Portrait Gallery,” which combines video clips of HIV-positive people, many of them activists, and an altar installation with electronically lit votive candles. Each candle displays a portrait, and viewers press the button in front of each candle in order to activate the video clip in which the person speaks. 29. Biddy Martin, Femininity Played Straight: The Significance of Being Lesbian (New York: Routledge, 1996), “Introduction,” 2. Among the targets of Martin’s critique is Leo Bersani’s work, as exemplified by “Is the Rectum a Grave?” in AIDS: Cultural

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Analysis, Cultural Activism, ed. Douglas Crimp (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), 197– 222. 30. Martin quotes the following passage: “Let’s suppose that lesbians and gay men in the academies and institutions of the contemporary United States have a particularly potent relation to grief. Exiled from the Law of the Social, many gay men and lesbians may have introjected the passionate hatred of mainstream homophobia and taken up an embattled, aggressive, and complex relation to the death drive.” Peggy Phelan, “Dying Man with a Movie Camera: Silverlake Life: The View from Here,” GLQ 2, no. 4 (1995): 380. 31. Martin, Femininity Played Straight, 29. 32. See Cathy Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory, and Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). 33. See Mark Seltzer, Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture (New York: Routledge, 1998); Wendy Brown, “Wounded Attachments,” in States of Injury (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 52–76; Lauren Berlant: The Queen of America Goes to Washington City, and “The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy, and Politics,” in Cultural Pluralism, Identity Politics and the Law, ed. Thomas Kearns and Austin Sarat (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999).

Wendy Brown

Resisting Left Melancholia In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. . . . only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. walter benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”

For the last two decades, cultural theorist Stuart Hall has insisted that the “crisis of the Left” is due neither to internal divisions in the activist or academic Left nor to the clever rhetoric or funding schemes of the Right. Rather, he has charged, this ascendancy is consequent to the Left’s own failure to apprehend the character of the age and to develop a political critique and a moral-political vision appropriate to this character. For Hall, the rise of the Thatcher-Reagan Right was a symptom rather than a cause of this failure, just as the Left’s dismissive or suspicious attitude toward cultural politics is for Hall a sign not of its unwavering principles but of its anachronistic habits of thought and its fears and anxieties about revising those habits. But what are the content and dynamic of these fears and anxieties? I want to develop just one thread of this problem through a consideration of the phenomenon named “Left melancholia” by Walter Benjamin more than half a century ago. What did Benjamin mean by and with this pejorative appellation for a certain intellectual and political bearing? As most readers will know, Benjamin was neither categorically nor characterologically opposed to the value and valence of sadness as such, nor to the potential insights gleaned from brooding over one’s losses. Indeed, he had a well-developed appreciation of the productive value of acedia, sadness, and mourning for political and cultural work, and in his study of Baudelaire, Benjamin treated melancholia itself as something of a creative wellspring. But “Left melancholia” is Benjamin’s unambivalent epithet for the revolutionary hack who is, finally, more attached to a particular political analysis or ideal—even to the failure of that ideal—than to seizing possibilities for radical change in the present. In Benjamin’s enigmatic insistence on the political value of a dialectical historical grasp of “the time of the Now,” Left 458

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melancholia represents not only a refusal to come to terms with the particular character of the present, that is, a failure to understand history in terms other than “empty time” or “progress.” It signifies as well a certain narcissism with regard to one’s past political attachments and identity that exceeds any contemporary investment in political mobilization, alliance, or transformation.1 The irony of melancholia, of course, is that attachment to the object of one’s sorrowful loss supersedes any desire to recover from this loss, to live free of it in the present, to be unburdened by it. This is what renders melancholia a persistent condition, a state, indeed, a structure of desire, rather than a transient response to death or loss. In Freud’s 1917 meditation on melancholia, he reminds us of a second singular feature of melancholy: It entails “a loss of a more ideal kind [than mourning]. The object has not perhaps actually died, but has been lost as an object of love.”2 Moreover, Freud suggests, the melancholic will often not know precisely what about the object has been loved and lost: “This would suggest that melancholia is in some way related to an object-loss which is withdrawn from consciousness, in contradistinction to mourning, in which there is nothing about the loss that is unconscious.”3 The loss precipitating melancholy is more often than not unavowed and unavowable. Finally, Freud suggests that the melancholic subject—low in self-regard, despairing, even suicidal—has shifted the reproach of the once-loved object (a reproach waged for not living up to the idealization by the beloved) onto itself, thus preserving the love or idealization of the object even as the loss of this love is experienced in the suffering of the melancholic. Now why would Benjamin use this term, and the emotional economy it represents, to talk about a particular formation on and of the Left? Benjamin never offers a precise formulation of Left melancholia. Rather, he deploys it as a term of opprobrium for those more beholden to certain long-held sentiments and objects than to the possibilities of political transformation in the present. Benjamin is particularly attuned to the melancholic’s investment in “things.” In the Trauerspiel, he argues that “melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge,” here suggesting that the loyalty of the melancholic converts its truth (“every loyal vow or memory”) about its beloved into a thing, indeed, imbues knowledge itself with a thinglike quality.4 Another version of this formulation: “In its tenacious self-absorption [melancholy] embraces dead objects in its contemplation.”5 More simply, melancholia is loyal “to the world of things,”6 suggesting a certain logic of fetishism—with all the conservatism and withdrawal from human relations that fetishistic desire implies—contained within the melancholic logic. In the critique of Kastner’s poems in which Benjamin first coins “Left melancholia,” Benjamin suggests that sentiments themselves become things for the Left melancholic who “takes as much pride in the

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traces of former spiritual goods as the bourgeois do in their material goods.”7 We come to love our Left passions and reasons, our Left analyses and convictions, more than we love the existing world that we presumably seek to alter with these terms or the future that would be aligned with them. Left melancholia, in short, is Benjamin’s name for a mournful, conservative, backward-looking attachment to a feeling, analysis, or relationship that has been rendered thinglike and frozen in the heart of the putative Leftist. If Freud is helpful here, then this condition presumably issues from some unaccountable loss, some unavowably crushed ideal, contemporarily signified by the terms Left, Socialism, Marx, or the Movement. Certainly the losses, accountable and unaccountable, of the Left are many in our own time. The literal disintegration of socialist regimes and the legitimacy of Marxism may well be the least of it. We are awash in the loss of a unified analysis and unified movement, in the loss of labor and class as inviolable predicates of political analysis and mobilization, in the loss of an inexorable and scientific forward movement of history, and in the loss of a viable alternative to the political economy of capitalism. And on the backs of these losses are still others: we are without a sense of international, and often even local, Left community; we are without conviction about the Truth of the social order; we are without a rich moral-political vision of the Good to guide and sustain political work. Thus we suffer with the sense of not only a lost movement but also a lost historical moment, not only a lost theoretical and empirical coherence but also a lost way of life and a lost course of pursuits. This much many on the Left can forthrightly admit, even if we do not know what to do about it. But in the hollow core of all these losses, perhaps in the place of our political unconscious, is there also an unavowed loss— the promise that Left analysis and Left commitment would supply its adherents a clear and certain path toward the good, the right, and the true? Is it not this promise that formed the basis for much of our pleasure in being on the Left, indeed, for our self-love as Leftists and our fellow feeling toward other Leftists? And if this love cannot be given up without demanding a radical transformation in the very foundation of our love, in our very capacity for political love or attachment, are we not doomed to Left melancholia, a melancholia that is certain to have effects that are not only sorrowful but also self-destructive? Freud again: “If the love for the object— a love which cannot be given up though the object itself is given up—takes refuge in narcissistic identification, then the hate comes into operation on this substitutive object, abusing it, debasing it, making it suffer and deriving sadistic satisfaction from its suffering.”8 Now our challenge would be to figure out who or what is this substitutive object. What do we hate that we might preserve the idealization of that romantic Left promise? What do we

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punish that we might save the old guarantees of the Left from our wrathful disappointment? Two familiar answers emerge from recent quarrels and reproaches on the Left. The first is a set of social and political formations variously known as cultural politics or identity politics. Here the conventional charge from one portion of the Left is that political movements rooted in cultural identity—racial, sexual, ethnic, or gendered—not only elide the fundamental structure of modernity, capitalism, and its fundamental formation, class, but also fragment Left political energies and interests such that coalition building is impossible. The second culprit also has various names—poststructuralism, discourse analysis, postmodernism, trendy literary theory got up as political analysis. The murder charges here are also familiar: postfoundational theories of the subject, truth, and social processes undermine the possibility of a theoretically coherent and factually true account of the world and also challenge the putatively objective grounds of Left norms. Together or separately, these two phenomena are held responsible for the weak, fragmented, and disoriented character of the contemporary Left. This much is old news. But if read through the prism of Left melancholia, the element of displacement in both sets of charges may appear more starkly, since we would be forced to ask: What aspects of Left analysis or orthodoxy have wilted on the vine for its adherents, but are safeguarded from this recognition through the scornful attention heaped on identity politics and poststructuralism? Indeed, what narcissistic identification with that orthodoxy is preserved in the lament over the loss of its hold on young Leftists and the loss of its potency in the political field? What love for the promises and guarantees that a Left analysis once held is preserved, as responsibility for the tattered condition of those promises and guarantees is distributed onto debased others? And do we here also see a certain thingness of the Left take shape, its reification as something that “is,” the fantastical memory that it once “was,” at the very moment that it so clearly is not/one?

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Now let us bring these speculations about a melancholic Left back to Stuart Hall’s more forthrightly political considerations about the troubles of the contemporary Left. If Hall understands our failure as a Left in the last quarter century as a failure within the Left to apprehend this time, this is a failure that is only reiterated and not redressed by our complaints against those who are succeeding (liberal centrists, neoconservatives, the Right) or by our complaints against one another (antiracists, feminists, queer activists, postmodernists, or unreconstructed Marxists). In Hall’s understanding, this failure is not simply the consequence of adherence to a particular

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analytic orthodoxy—the determinism of capital, the primacy of class—although it is certainly that. Rather, this failure results as well from a particular intellectual straitjacket—an insistence on a materialism that refuses the importance of the subject and the subjective, the question of style, the problematic of language. And it is the combination of these two that is deadly: “Our sectarianism,” Hall argues in the conclusion of The Hard Road to Renewal, consists not only of a defensiveness toward the agendas fixed by now anachronistic political-economic formations (those of the 1930s and 1945), but is also due to a certain notion of politics, inhabited not so much as a theory, more as a habit of mind. We go on thinking a unilinear and irreversible political logic, driven by some abstract entity we call “the economic” or “capital,” unfolding to its preordained end. Whereas, as Thatcherism clearly shows, politics actually works more like the logic of language: you can always put it another way if you try hard enough.9

Certainly the course of capital shapes the conditions of possibility in politics, but politics itself “is either conducted ideologically, or not at all.”10 Or, in another of Hall’s pithy formulas, “politics does not reflect majorities, it constructs them.”11 It is important to be clear here. Hall never claims that ideology determines the course of globalization but claims that it harnesses it for one political purpose or another, and when it is successful, the political and economic strategies represented by a particular ideology will also themselves bring into being certain political-economic formations within global capitalist developments. Now we are beginning . . . to move into a “post-Fordist” society—what some theorists call disorganized capitalism, the era of “flexible specialisation.” One way of reading present developments is that “privatization” is Thatcherism’s way of harnessing and appropriating this underlying movement within a specific economic and political strategy and constructing it within the terms of a specific philosophy. It has succeeded, to some degree, in aligning its historical, political, cultural and sexual “logics” with some of the most powerful tendencies in the contemporary logics of capitalist development. And this, in part, is what gives it its supreme confidence, its air of ideological complacency: what makes it appear to “have history on its side,” to be coterminous with the inevitable course of the future. The left, however, instead of rethinking its economic, political, and cultural strategies in the light of this deeper, underlying “logic” of dispersal and diversification (which after all, need not necessarily be an enemy of greater democratization) simply resists it. If Thatcherism can lay claim to it, then we must have nothing to do with it. Is there any more certain way of rendering yourself historically anachronistic?12

If the contemporary Left often clings to the formations and formulations of another epoch, one in which the notions of unified movements, social

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totalities, and class-based politics were viable categories of political and theoretical analysis, this means that it literally renders itself a conservative force in history—one that not only misreads the present but also installs traditionalism in the very heart of its praxis, in the place where commitment to risk and upheaval belongs. Walter Benjamin sketches this phenomenon in his attack on Eric Kastner, the Left-wing Weimer Republic poet, who is the subject of his “Left-Wing Melancholy” essay: “This poet is dissatisfied, indeed heavy-hearted. But this heaviness of heart derives from routine. For to be in a routine means to have sacrificed one’s idiosyncracies, to have forfeited the gift of distaste. And that makes one heavy-hearted.”13 In a different tonality, Stuart Hall sketches this problem in the Left’s response to Thatcherism: I remember the moment in the 1979 election when Mr. Callaghan, on his last political legs, so to speak, said with real astonishment about the offensive of Mrs. Thatcher that “She means to tear society up by the roots.” This was an unthinkable idea in the social-democratic vocabulary: a radical attack on the status quo. The truth is that traditionalist ideas, the ideas of social and moral respectability, have penetrated so deep inside socialist consciousness that it is quite common to find people committed to a radical political programme underpinned by wholly traditional feelings and sentiments.14

Traditionalism is hardly new in Left politics, but it has become especially pronounced and pernicious in recent years as a consequence of (1) its righteous formulation as a defense against the Thatcher-Reagan-Gingrich “revolutions” (epitomized in the dismantling of the welfare state and the privatization of a number of public functions and services), (2) the development of cultural politics, and especially sexual politics, and (3) the disintegration of socialist regimes and the severe discrediting of Left politicaleconomic aims that this disintegration occasioned. The combination of these three phenomena yield Left formulations that tend to have as their primary content the defense of liberal New Deal politics and especially the welfare state, on one hand, and the defense of civil liberties, on the other. In short, the Left has come to represent a politics that seeks to protect a set of freedoms and entitlements that confront neither the dominations contained in both nor the limited value of those freedoms and entitlements in contemporary configurations of capitalism. And when this traditionalism is conjoined with a loss of faith in the egalitarian vision so fundamental to the socialist challenge to the capitalist mode of distribution and with a loss of faith in the emancipatory vision fundamental to the socialist challenge to the capitalist mode of production, the problem of Left traditionalism becomes very serious indeed. What emerges is a Left that operates without either a deep and radical critique of the status quo or a compelling alternative to the existing order of things. But perhaps even more troubling, it

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is a Left that has become more attached to its impossibility than to its potential fruitfulness, a Left that is most at home dwelling not in hopefulness but in its own marginality and failure, a Left that is thus caught in a structure of melancholic attachment to a certain strain of its own dead past, whose spirit is ghostly, whose structure of desire is backward looking and punishing. What is entailed in throwing off the melancholic and conservative habits of the Left to invigorate it with a radical (from the Latin radix, meaning “root”) critical and visionary spirit again? This would be a spirit that embraces the notion of a deep and indeed unsettling transformation of society rather than recoiling at this prospect, even as we must become wise to the fact that neither total revolution nor the automatic progress of history would carry us toward whatever reformulated vision we might develop. What political hope can we nurture that does not falsely ground itself in the notion that “history is on our side” or that there is some inevitability of popular attachment to whatever values we might develop as those of a new Left vision? What kind of political and economic order can we imagine that is neither state-run nor utopian, neither repressive nor libertarian, neither economically impoverished nor culturally gray? How might we draw creative sustenance from socialist ideals of dignity, equality, and freedom while recognizing that these ideals were conjured from historical conditions and prospects that are not those of the present? My emphasis on the melancholic logic of certain contemporary Left tendencies is not meant to recommend therapy as the route to answering these questions. It does, however, suggest that the feelings and sentiments—including those of sorrow, rage, and anxiety about broken promises and lost compasses—that sustain our attachments to Left analyses and Left projects ought to be examined for what they create in the way of potentially conservative and even selfdestructive undersides of putatively progressive political aims. NOTES

The epigraph is from Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Walter Benjamin, Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 255. 1. For Benjamin’s bewitching formulation of the “Then” and the “Now” as political terms unapproachable by “Past” and “Present,” see his notes on method for the Arcades Project, published as “N [Re the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress],” in Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History, ed. G. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), especially 49, 51–52, and 80. 2. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), 245. 3. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 245.

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4. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. J. Osborne (London: Verso, 1977), 156–57. 5. Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 157. 6. Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 157. 7. Walter Benjamin, “Left-Wing Melancholy,” republished in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. A. Kaes, M. Jay, and E. Dimendberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 305. 8. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 251. 9. Stuart Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left (London: Verso, 1988), 273. 10. Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal, 274. 11. Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal, 266. 12. Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal, 276. 13. Benjamin, “Left-Wing Melancholy,” 305. 14. Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal, 194.

Judith Butler

Afterword After Loss, What Then? Not only did men leave and children grow up and die, but even the misery didn’t last. One day she wouldn’t even have that. This very grief that had twisted her into a curve on the floor and flayed her would be gone. She would lose that too. toni morrison, Sula

The essays in this volume offer a way to think about loss as constituting social, political, and aesthetic relations, thereby overcoming the conventional understanding that “loss” belongs to a purely psychological or psychoanalytic discourse. But they do something more, since they exemplify, I believe, a new kind of scholarship that seeks to bring theory to bear on the analysis of social and political life, in particular, to the temporality of social and political life. The presumptions that the future follows the past, that mourning might follow melancholia, that mourning might be completed are all poignantly called into question in these pages as we realize a series of paradoxes: the past is irrecoverable and the past is not past; the past is the resource for the future and the future is the redemption of the past; loss must be marked and it cannot be represented; loss fractures representation itself and loss precipitates its own modes of expression. And we are considering different kinds of losses here: the losses of genocide, the loss of “humanness” under slavery; the loss that is undergone with exile; the loss that is effaced through colonization; the loss of culture that is performed by the mandatory production of a colonized subject; the loss defrayed through mania; disavowed loss and its visual and textual effects; the redemption that animates loss; the longing to which loss gives rise. And perhaps most difficult, the loss of loss itself: somewhere, sometime, something was lost, but no story can be told about it; no memory can retrieve it; a fractured horizon looms in which to make one’s way as a spectral agency, one for whom a full “recovery” is impossible, one for whom the irrecoverable becomes, paradoxically, the condition of a new political agency. But what precisely is irrecoverable, and what form does this new political 467

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agency take? On the one hand, there is the loss of place and the loss of time, a loss that cannot be recovered or recuperated but that leaves its enigmatic trace. And then there is something else that one cannot “get over,” one cannot “work through,” which is the deliberate act of violence against a collectivity, humans who have been rendered anonymous for violence and whose death recapitulates an anonymity for memory. Such violence cannot be “thought,” constitutes an assault on thinking, negates thinking in the mode of recollection and recovery. But what then emerges in the place of thought? Or what new thought emerges? It is not as if thinking ceases, but after such an internal break, it continues, and that continuation is founded and structured by that break, carries the break with it as the signature of its history. We might say, in Benjaminian fashion, that thought emerges from the ruins, as the ruins, of this decimation. It does not constitute its reversal or recuperation, its animated afterlife. Animated precisely by what is not recoverable, this is a thought that is unthought to itself and thus opaque, but nevertheless alive and persistent. What results is a melancholic agency who cannot know its history as the past, cannot capture its history through chronology, and does not know who it is except as the survival, the persistence of a certain unavowability that haunts the present. Places are lost—destroyed, vacated, barred—but then there is some new place, and it is not the first, never can be the first. And so there is an impossibility housed at the site of this new place. What is new, newness itself, is founded upon the loss of original place, and so it is a newness that has within it a sense of belatedness, of coming after, and of being thus fundamentally determined by a past that continues to inform it. And so this past is not actually past in the sense of “over,” since it continues as an animating absence in the presence, one that makes itself known precisely in and through the survival of anachronism itself. We could say, with well-deserved pathos and in the voice of traditional modernism, that this new place is one of no belonging, where subjectivity becomes untethered from its collective fabric, where individuation becomes a historical necessity. But perhaps this is a place where belonging now takes place in and through a common sense of loss (which does not mean that all these losses are the same). Loss becomes condition and necessity for a certain sense of community, where community does not overcome the loss, where community cannot overcome the loss without losing the very sense of itself as community. And if we say this second truth about the place where belonging is possible, then pathos is not negated, but it turns out to be oddly fecund, paradoxically productive. But let us be clear about what this productivity is. Whatever it is, it cannot constitute a rewriting of the past or a redemption that would successfully reconstitute its meaning from and as the present. Whatever is produced from this condition of loss will bear the trace of loss, but how will it bear

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it? In what form? Let us consider briefly the account that Benjamin gives of this strange production, one that is not relieved of its eeriness, since one might say that Benjamin and Freud both give a certain voice to the essays here, even as neither could have been their authors. Indeed, the voice of each might be said to survive the author, but not in a way that extends that authorship. Indeed, authorship is wrecked through its appropriation, and it is the strange fecundity of that wreckage that I am trying to address here. In The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Benjamin explains that a certain problem of loss emerges when established narratives begin to falter, suggesting that narrative functioned once as a way of containing loss. He asks, for instance, what happens when the religious narrative that has underwritten historical development fails? And is there a specific aesthetic mode in which that loss is registered? Is the artistic form of the Trauerspiel the way in which that loss is registered? And if it is registered, we might ask, Is “registration” something different from a means of generic containment or disavowal? Benjamin’s example is the baroque, but does the baroque stay in the past for him? Of what time is he writing when he claims, “Here, as in other spheres of baroque life, what is vital is the transposition of the originally temporal data into a figurative spatial simultaneity.”1 The loss of redemptive narrative (and here we must suspend the meaning of redemption, for it seems in Benjamin at this instance to be synonymous with eschatological closure) takes shape as figurative and as spatial and as simultaneous. So, the collapse of sequence into simultaneity seems to imply both spatiality and figuration. This will have consequences for thinking through contemporary renditions of loss, especially for the geographical parameters of that analysis; and this happens not only because a religious narrative of redemption has collapsed but also because other narratives of progress and development have proven to be contingent, have produced through their own excess, sites of exclusion as sites of resistance. But let us return to Benjamin before laying out those implications. Spatialization will emerge as a response to the loss of eschatology. History itself, on such a view, becomes a kind of catastrophe, a fall from which there is no redemption, the dissolution of sequential temporality itself. As a result of this dissolution, history becomes grasped as a spatial image. Benjamin formulates it this way: “History merges into the setting.” Or again: “History is secularized as the setting.” Or again: “Chronological movement is grasped and analysed in a spatial image” (92). He makes his point by way of the Trauerspiel, but the Trauerspiel is also making another point: “In contrast to the spasmodic chronological progression of tragedy, the Trauerspiel takes place in a spatial continuum, which one might describe as choreographic” (95). So now it seems that the loss of history is not the loss of movement, but a certain configuration (figural, spatial, simultaneous) that has its own dynamism, if not its own dance.2

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This spatial thinking, which is not to be confused with a paralysis of motion, will become characteristic of melancholy for Benjamin, but not, therefore, with stasis. The Trauerspiel is conceivable as pantomime; the tragedy is not (the latter is about action). So here Benjamin tells us that pantomime will be a way of registering the loss of eschatological hope. In these plays, according to Benjamin, pantomime becomes the index of mourning, or the form that mourning takes. And pantomime relies on the gesture, the one that has, as it were, lost its referent, the one that operates through a nonmimetic semiotic of its own. “These are plays in which mournfulness finds satisfaction: plays for the mournful” (119). So what is at once figurative and spatial will be also simultaneous, which means that more than one movement is happening at the same time, and these movements are “choreographed” and they take the form of “pantomime,” voiceless mimes that not only take the place of eschatological narrative but become the very means by which that loss is registered. This choreographic pantomime is also ostentatious, and later Benjamin will link it with the ineluctable sensuousness of representation itself. This loss is bringing bodies to the foreground. This is, in fact, a loss registered as a certain motion of bodies, as if telling is supplanted by moving, and moving, which has no direction and is motivated by no causality,3 becomes its own kind of display. This seems sometimes to verge on slapstick when, for instance, Benjamin writes: “Comedy—or more precisely: the pure joke—is the essential inner side of mourning which from time to time, like the lining of a dress at the hem or lapel, makes its presence felt” (125).4 Like the lining of a dress at the hem or the lapel—mourning is thus likened to the material of clothing, the material that is mostly hidden, that is suddenly, even unexpectedly, felt against the flesh, the leg or the neck, and so mourning is staged here as a certain encounter between a commodified material and the limb that knows it only on occasion. Mourning is likened to an “interior” region of clothing that is suddenly, and perhaps with some embarrassment, exposed, not to the public eye, but to the flesh itself. This is a presence, a proximity, that undoes what appears, that is counter to the effect of appearance, but is also part of the realm of appearance itself: mourning emerges as the lining of the dress, where the dress is, as it were, laughing. It tinges the appearance; it suggests an “underneath,” but it is still part of appearance, its frame, its artifice, its suggestiveness and potential undoing. And mourning is, ineluctably, an encounter with sensuousness, but not a “natural” one, one that is conditioned by the proximity of the artifact to flesh. That mourning is subjected to a metaphorical identification with the artifice that brings the body into view suggests the very process by which mourning works. It displays, and it displays the body in a certain sensuousness, without purpose, without direction, but not, therefore, without movement.

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Benjamin then makes this connection clearer when his discussion of mourning blends into a discussion of melancholia. In the early Freud, of course, melancholia was defined as the failure of mourning, as its disavowal, and something of that distinction clearly also works for Benjamin. But his exposition also allows the slide of mourning into melancholia. We can see that what enters his discussion when melancholia emerges is the notion of deadness, something that does not appear in the discussion of pantomime or choreography or linen against flesh. He writes: Mourning is the state of mind in which feeling revives the empty world in the form of a mask [das Gefühl die entleerte Welt maskenhaft neubelebt], and derives an enigmatic satisfaction in contemplating it. Every feeling is bound to an a priori object, and the representation of this object is its phenomenology. Accordingly, the theory of mourning, which emerged unmistakably as a pendant to the theory of tragedy, can only be developed in the description of that world which is revealed under the gaze of the melancholy man. The world is revived in a masked form, in a masked way, not as a mask, but through a form of masking and as its result. The masking does not precisely conceal, since what is lost cannot be recovered, but it marks the simultaneous condition of an irrecoverable loss that gives way to a reanimation of an evacuated world. (139; German, 318)

Although the Trauerspiele are not tragedies, they are understood to be commonly concerned with mourning, its possibility and its impossibility. The laws governing the Trauerspiel are to be found in the heart of mourning, but mourning is not personal: it is not the mourning of a particular poet or individual: this is “a feeling that is released from any empirical subject and is intimately bound to the fullness of an object” (139). In a phenomenological sense, mourning is part of any epistemological act that “intends” or “anticipates” the fullness of an object, because that “end” cannot be reached, and that fullness is elusive. But this situation becomes true only under those conditions in which “fulfillment” or “satisfaction” suffers the same fate as the forms of eschatological closure discussed above. Mourning is the relation to the “object” only under the conditions in which history, and the narrative coherence and direction it once promised, has been shattered. The new choreography of the body constitutes one consequence of this shattering, but that is a form of mourning that is not yet resolved into melancholia. The melancholic form deadens the very body enlivened, in a ghostly way, through pantomime. Thus, Benjamin can and does write that “the deadening of emotions in mourning can produce a pathological state, but this state, it will turn out, will characterize our relation to history; a symptom of depersonalization, alienation from the body, and then, in which the most simple object appears to be a symbol of some enigmatic wisdom because it lacks any natural, creative relationship to us” (140).

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The encounter between flesh and artifice is thus only one way of registering this loss. The second way, the more distinctively melancholic one, foregrounds the world of things and entails a deadening of passions. The gestural life of the pantomime, which has no referent or which, more aptly put, registers its historical loss, is converted into the melancholic mask animated by the emptying of the world, one that is not only without direction but also without movement. Melancholy does not give up the task of redemption, and deadens itself in the pursuit of this impossible task: “Melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge. But in its tenacious self-absorption it embraces dead objects in its contemplation, in order to redeem them” (157). Melancholy, Benjamin tells us, sustains a loyalty to the world of things; this would be a world in which it is not the lining (echoing Marx’s famous linen from the first volume of Capital) against the flesh but the lining as an object of contemplation, an enigmatic symbol, that transfixes the melancholic in a motionless gaze.5 It may be that the distinction finally between mourning and melancholia does not hold, not only for the reasons that became apparent in Freud, but also because they are, inevitably, experienced in a certain configuration of simultaneity and succession. Many of the essays here refer to the sensuality of melancholia, to its form of pleasure, its mode of becoming, and therefore reject its identification with paralysis. But it probably remains true that it is only because we know its stasis that we can trace its motion, and that we want to. The rituals of mourning are sites of merriment; Benjamin knew this as well, but as his text effectively shows, it is not always possible to keep the dance alive. If suffering, if damage, if annihilation produces its own pleasure and persistence, it is one that takes place against the backdrop of a history that is over, that emerges now as a setting, a scene, a spatial configuration of bodies that move in pleasure or fail to move, that move and fail to move at the same time. If catastrophe is not representable according to the narrative explanations that would “make sense” of history, then making sense of ourselves and charting the future are not impossible. But we are, as it were, marked for life, and that mark is insuperable, irrecoverable. It becomes the condition by which life is risked, by which the questions of whether one can move, and with whom, and in what way are framed and incited by the irreversibility of loss itself.

NOTES

The epigraph is from Toni Morrison, Sula (New York: Knopf, 1973), 108. 1. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. J. Osborne (London: Verso, 1985). “Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspels” in Walter Benjamin Abhandlungen, Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991). For subsequent passages, page numbers are cited parenthetically in the text.

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2. Here, Benjamin seems to be citing Nietzsche on the “new choreography of the body.” 3. Benjamin writes, “It will never be true that the task of the dramatist is to exhibit the causal necessity of a sequence of events on the stage.” The core of the notion of fate is not natural causality, but guilt, which “however fleeting its appearance. . .unleashes causality as the instrument of the irresistibly unfolding fatalities. Fate is the entelechy of events within the field of guilt” (129). 4. The entire sentence reads: “Die Komik—richtiger: der reine Spass—ist die obligate Innenseite der Trauer, die ab und zu wie das Futter eines Kleides im Saum oder revers zur Geltung kommt” (304). So, it is not precisely that mourning lets “its presence” be known, but that it comes to have its influence, comes into play, even exercises its force. 5. Benjamin seems to be elaborating on the masked animation that emerges from the emptied world in his letter to Adorno of May 7, 1940, one of his last in Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence, 1928–1940 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999). There he objects to Adorno’s reading of “bearing” in Benjamin’s Baudelaire manuscript, and Benjamin makes clear that for him, bearing has to be understood not as something “consciously ‘adopted’ or ‘put on display’ . . . it can certainly be encountered in an unconscious form that is nonetheless a kind of ‘bearing.’” Further along in that same letter, he clarifies: “I do not think it is too bold to claim that we encounter someone’s ‘bearing’ when the essential loneliness of an individual properly manifests itself to us. That loneliness which, far from representing the site of all the individual’s richness, could well represent instead the site of the individual’s historically conditioned emptiness, of the persona as the individual’s sorry fate . . . there is also an imprescriptible bearing of emptiness (as with aspects of the later Baudelaire). In short: bearing, as I understand it, differs as much from what you are denouncing as a branded skin differs from a tattooed one” (331).

contributors

Wendy Brown is Professor of Political Science and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her most recent books include States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, 1995), Politics Out of History (Princeton, 2001), and, coedited with Janet Halley, Left Legalism/Left Critique (Duke, 2002). Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (Columbia, 1987), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1990), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (Routledge, 1993), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (Stanford, 1997), and Excitable Speech: A Politics of Performance (Routledge, 1997), as well as numerous articles and contributions on philosophy and feminist and queer theory. Her most recent work on Antigone and the politics of kinship is entitled Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (Columbia, 2000). Her new project is a critique of ethical violence that works with modernist philosophical and literary texts. Yvette Christiansë teaches in the Department of English at Fordham University. She was born and raised in South Africa (in Johannesburg and Cape Town in the Republic of South Africa, and in Mbabane and Manzini in the Kingdom of Swaziland). She has also lived in Australia, to which her family migrated to escape apartheid. Christiansë’s poetry and fiction have been published in Australia, the United States, South Africa, and Canada. Her book of poetry, Castaway, was published by Duke in October 1999. At Fordham University, she teaches African American and South African literature, as well as literature of the African diaspora, poetics, and race studies. Vilashini Cooppan is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University. Her research and teaching interests include postcolonial theory and litera475

476

contributors

ture, world literature, and globalization. She is presently working on a book project entitled Inner Territories: Phantasms of the Nation in Postcolonial Writing. Douglas Crimp is Professor of Art History and Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester. He is the author of On the Museum’s Ruins (MIT, 1993) and AIDS DemoGraphics (Bay Press, 1990), as well as the editor of AIDS: Cultural Analysis/ Cultural Activism (MIT, 1988). Crimp is a recipient of the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award for distinction in art criticism and twice received the Art Critics Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. For the calendar year 2000, he was a Rockefeller Fellow in the Program for the Study of Sexuality, Gender, Health, and Human Rights at the Columbia University School of Public Health. He is currently writing a book on the films of Andy Warhol. Ann Cvetkovich is Associate Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (Rutgers, 1992) and An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Duke, forthcoming). David L. Eng is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Rutgers University. He is author of Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Duke, 2001), as well as coeditor with Alice Y. Hom of Q & A: Queer in Asian America (Temple, 1998), and winner of a Lambda Literary Award and a Cultural Studies Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies. His current book project, Queer Diasporas/Psychic Diasporas, explores the impact of transnational and queer social movements on family and kinship in the late twentieth century. Shinhee Han holds joint appointments as Associate Director of Outreach and Special Projects with both Student Services and Counseling and Psychological Services at Columbia University. In addition, she has a private psychotherapy practice in New York City. Previously, Han was a staff psychotherapist with the counseling services of Northwestern University and the University of Chicago. David Johnson is a lecturer in the Department of Literature at the Open University in England, the author of Shakespeare and South Africa (Oxford, 1996), and coauthor, with Steve Pete and Max du Plessis, of Jurisprudence: A South African Perspective (Butterworths, 2001). David Kazanjian is Assistant Professor of English at Queens College, and Visiting Assistant Professor of English at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is author of Articulating “America:” Imperial Citizenship before the Civil War (Minnesota, forthcoming). David Lloyd is Hartley Burr Alexander Professor in the Humanities at Scripps College Claremont and Director of the Scripps College Humanities Institute. He is the author of several books, including most recently Culture and the State, with Paul Thomas (Routledge 1997); The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, edited with Lisa Lowe (Duke, 1997); and Ireland after History (Cork/Notre Dame, 2000). Dana Luciano is Assistant Professor of English at Hamilton College, where she teaches American literature, Gothic literature, and lesbian/gay studies. She has published articles on Henry James and Charles Brockden Brown, and is currently working on a book-length study of mourning and nationality in the nineteenth-century United States.

contributors

477

Susette Min is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English at Pomona College, where she is writing a book on Asian American art and literature. She is also a freelance writer and independent curator. Most recently, Min wrote an essay on muzak and fatigue for Cabinet and curated a solo exhibition of installation artist Rina Banerjee at The Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia. Rosalind C. Morris is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Columbia University. Her most recent book is entitled In the Place of Origins: Modernity and Its Mediums in Northern Thailand (Duke, 2000), and her writings have appeared in such journals as positions, Public Culture, Social Text, and differences. Currently, she is editing a volume on photography and modernity in East and Southeast Asia, and is completing a book entitled Specular Economies, about the histories of value and speculation in Southeast Asia. Fred Moten is Associate Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Moten has published articles on black performance, literature, and film. His book Ensemble and Improvisation: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press. Marc Nichanian is Associate Professor of Armenian Studies at Columbia University. His fields of expertise are modern Armenian literature, the history of Armenian language, philosophy of translation, and the analysis of discourses related to the genocidal events of the twentieth century. His most recent publications are KAM V (in Armenian), a collective volume comprising literary studies and translations from European authors (Los Angeles, 2002), and Writers of Disaster, Volume I: The National Revolution (Gomidas Institute, forthcoming). Mark Sanders is Assistant Professor of English and American Literature at Brandeis University. He is the author of Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid (Duke, 2002). His work on testimony and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has appeared in Law Text Culture, Diacritics, and Modern Fiction Studies. Charity Scribner is Assistant Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at MIT. In 2003 MIT will publish her first book, Working Memory. Kaja Silverman is Class of 1940 Professor of Rhetoric and Film at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of six books, including World Spectators (Stanford, 2000), Male Subjectivity at the Margins (Routledge, 1992), and The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Indiana, 1988). She is presently working on photography and on installation art. Alys Eve Weinbaum is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Washington, Seattle. She is currently completing her book Wayward Reproductions: Genealogies of Race and Nation in Trans-Atlantic Modern Thought and coediting, with Susan Gillman, W. E. B. Du Bois and the Gender of the Color Line. Her work has appeared in differences, Social Text, Feminist Studies, Signs, and Ariel.

name index

Abdul-Hamid, 100 Aborigine Protection Society, 284 Abovian, Khach’atur, 144–45 Abraham, Karl, 156 Abraham, Nicolas, 158–59, 168, 170, 171, 181n2, 370n43 ACT UP, 15, 192, 200, 427–53 Adorno, Theodor, 142, 420n6, 473n5 Advocate magazine, 190, 191 African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, 93n10 African National Congress (ANC), 10–11, 80, 81, 92n4, 290, 293 Agamben, Giorgio, 13, 233–35, 237–38, 244, 247, 249n19, 307, 308 Aguilar Mora, Jorge, 255 Aharonian, Avedis, 99, 120n1 AIDS: A Living Archive (Carlomusto and Rossett), 452, 456n28 AIDS DemoGraphics (Crimp and Rolston), 429, 431 Aksornsarn (newspaper), 46 Alexander, Elizabeth, 59, 61 Alexander, James, 284–85 Althusser, Louis, 71, 358 Ambassadors, The (Holbein), 256, 257, 274n24 American Psychological Association, 455n16 Améry, Jean, 134 Among the Ruins (Essayan), 101–4, 107–20, 121n7, 122n17, 135, 137–40

Anderson, Benedict, 29, 52, 53n4, 58n45, 261, 274n25 Andonian, Aram, 128, 133 And the Band Played On (Shilts), 188 Angels in America (Kushner), 431 Antelme, Robert, 134, 140 Antigone (Sophocles), 82–86, 89–91, 126, 129, 131, 137–38, 141, 143, 145–46 Apocalypse Now (film), 250n42 Appadurai, Arjun, 151–52 April 25, 1975 (resonance) (Vo), 21, 229–31, 242–47 Apter, Emily, 425n77 Aragon, Louis, 309–10 Arcades Project (Benjamin), 419n6 Arendt, Hannah, 93n10, 147 Argentine National Commission on the Disappeared, 92n9 Aristotle, 7, 17, 157, 249n19 Armstrong, Nancy, 424n59, 425n60 Arnold, Matthew, 210, 212 Aronowitz, Stanley, 182n11 Ashtaraketsi, Nerses, 143–44 Atsani Phonlacan. See Nai Phi “À une passante” (Baudelaire), 402–3, 408, 415, 417 Aylward, Alfred, 286 Badlands (film), 341n6 Baer, Ulrich, 423n43 Baker, Houston, 151, 180, 183n20 Balbure, Brigitte, 317n18, 319n33

479

480

index

Baldwin, James, 61 Bangkok Post, 49 Banzhaf, Marion, 446, 447 Baraka, Amiri, 74n12 Barkly, Henry, 283, 287 Bartevian, Souren, 99, 100, 120n2 Barthes, Roland, 56n24, 64, 67–71, 73, 74n14, 75nn15, 25, 238–39, 249n25, 252, 411, 424n59 Baudelaire, Charles, 14, 398, 399, 401–5, 407–9, 411–17, 420nn25, 27, 421nn30, 32, 33, 424n49, 425n62, 458, 473n5 Bauer, Amy, 438, 440, 441, 450 Beckett, Samuel, 44 Bedouin Hornbook (Mackey), 59–61 Being and Time (Heidegger), 325, 326, 341nn16, 17 Beledian, Krikor, 121n7, 122n17 Benjamin, Jessica, 364 Benjamin, Walter, 1–2, 4–6, 9, 10, 13, 14, 16–17, 20, 39, 52, 56n24, 58n48, 120, 205, 220, 308, 309, 313, 341, 342n23, 377, 398–403, 405, 407–13, 416, 417, 418n2, 421nn32, 33, 424nn47–49, 51, 425nn62, 64, 426n78, 458–60, 463, 468– 72, 473nn1–5 Bennett, Tony, 246 Berger, John, 396, 398 Bergson, Henri, 399–400 Berlant, Lauren, 428, 431, 453 Bernal, Martin, 95n25 Bernanos, Georges, 341n18 Bersani, Leo, 195–97, 242 Beuys, Joseph, 20, 300, 301, 304–11, 315, 317n11 Beyond Queer (Bower), 193 Bhabha, Homi, 349–50 Biko, Steve, 78 Bismarck, Otto von, 315 Black and White Strangers (Warren), 161 Black Athena (Bernal), 95n25 Black Culture and Black Consciousness (Levine), 53 Black Dog of Fate (Balakian), 136 Black (Native) Administration Act, South African (1927), 393n7 Black (Native) Laws Amendment Act, South African (1952), 393n7 Black Prophet, The (Carleton), 207 Black Sun (Kristeva), 4 Blanch, G. R., 286–87 Blanchot, Maurice, 43, 44, 52, 98n58

Block, Robert, 299n48 Bodies That Matter (Butler), 193 Body in Pain, The (Scarry), 12 Boer Nation, 388 Bollas, Christopher, 364 Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold (Davis and Kennedy), 436 Boraine, Alex, 81–83, 91 Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel, 157 Bordowitz, Gregg, 431, 432, 436, 451, 454n3 Bourke, Angela, 227n9 Bower, Bruce, 193 Bowring Treaty (1855), 40 Boylan, Thomas, 213 Bradley, Mamie Till, 12, 63, 64, 67, 69, 71, 72, 73n5 Bram, Christopher, 195 Braun, Volker, 300 Brecht, Bertolt, 301 Bresson, Robert, 341n18 Brik, Lili, 301, 311, 312 British Colonial Office, 283, 288 Bronfen, Elizabeth, 158 Brown, Laura, 433 Brown, Wendy, 2, 16–17, 351, 369n26, 453, 458–65, 475 Brown, William Hill, 186n60 Brown, William Wells, 165 Buchanan, Patrick, 191 Buddhism, 45, 46, 252 Burou, Georges, 262 Burton, Robert, 17 Butler, Judith, 4, 89, 181n2, 193, 234–37, 249n28, 260, 261, 275n37, 355, 361–62, 365, 370n50, 467–73, 475 Cadava, Eduardo, 425n62 Cahan, Jean Axelrad, 295n8 Caillois, Roger, 275n35 Caliban (Fernández Retamar), 253 Calinescu, Matei, 266 Callen, Michael, 452 Camera Lucida (Barthes), 67–71, 74n14, 239 Campbell, John, 296n24 Camus, Renaud, 249n25 “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (Spivak), 435 “Can You Be black and Look at This?” (Alexander), 59 Cape Argus, 292 Capital (Marx), 279, 280, 282, 472

index CARASA, 438 Carby, Hazel, 183n19 Carleton, William, 207–8 Carlomusto, Jean, 429, 432, 436, 438, 441, 443, 450–52, 454n3, 456n28 Carnarvon, Lord, 284 Carnegie Report on White Poverty (1932), 96n34 Carpentier, Alejo, 253 Caruth, Cathy, 24n18, 431, 453 Cassian, John, 13–14 Caucasia (Senna), 343, 347, 349 Caviezel, Jim, 328 Celan, Paul, 45 Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 445 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 48 Cervantes, Miguel de, 263 Chaldeans, 116, 124n34 Chaplin, Ben, 329 Charcot, Jean Martin, 423n43 Chawalit Yongchaiyudh, General, 34 Cheng, Anne, 246–47 Cherry Grove, Fire Island (Newton), 436 Chesnutt, Charles Waddell, 161 Chilean National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation, 89 China Beach (television series), 250n42 China Men (Kingston), 348, 351 “Chinese-American Personality and Mental Health” (Sue and Sue), 348 Chinese Communist Party (CCP), 39, 52 Chow, Rey, 425n78 Christensen, Kim, 438, 439, 442–43, 445– 47, 449–51 Christiansë, Yvette, 6, 14–15, 372–95, 475 Cinders (Derrida), 23n, 372 Citizen and Subject (Mamdani), 86 City, The (Die Stadt) (Masereel), 396, 397 “Civil War in France, The” (Marx), 279 Clark, George, 286 Clotel (Brown), 165 Cobra (Sarduy), 22, 251–72 Colored American Magazine, 148, 150–52, 161, 180, 183nn13, 14 Colqhoun, Patrick, 283–85 Columbus, Christopher, 263–65 Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels), 37, 39, 53, 309 Communist Party of Thailand (CPT), 35, 37, 39, 44, 46, 52 Congress, U.S., 347

481

Contending Forces (Hopkins), 148, 149, 180, 187n72 Cooppan, Vilashini, 20, 22, 251–77, 475–76 Coquio, Catherine, 132 Cosmopolitan magazine, 429, 441 Coulanges, Fustel de, 1 Crary, Jonathan, 419n3 Crimp, Douglas, 9, 10, 15, 188–202, 365, 429, 431–35, 476 “Critique of the Gotha Programme” (Marx), 280 Croesus, King of Lydia, 143 Croker, Thomas Crofton, 209–10, 212–14 Cronjé, Geoffrey, 394n14 Crowley, Sean, 223–25 Cunanan, Andrew, 188, 190, 194 Cvetkovich, Ann, 15, 427–57, 476 D’Adesky, Anne, 429 Dalke, Ann, 186n60 Danzig, Alexis, 440, 450 Davis, Brad, 190 Davis, Madeline, 436 Davis, Susan Bluestein, 190 Days of Heaven (film), 341n6 De Beers Mining Company, 285, 291, 292, 296n24, 298n43, 299n44 De donde son los cantantes (Sarduy), 263 Deer Hunter, The (film), 250n42 De Institutis Coenobiorum (Cassian), 13–14 Deleuze, Gilles, 136, 275n29 Derrida, Jacques, 23n, 25n32, 56n31, 66, 77, 84, 90, 91, 98n58, 146, 295n20, 296n23, 372 Descartes, René, 18–20, 25n32, 66 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (American Psychological Association), 455n16 Diamond Fields Advertiser, 286–87 Dias, Bartolomeu, 383 Didiza, Thoka, 298n41 Discourse on Method (Descartes), 18 Disidentifications (Muñoz), 363 “Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex, The” (Freud), 405 DIVA-TV, 429, 431, 454n3 Doctors, Liars, and Women (video), 429 Dorow, Heidi, 446–48 Dorpat, University of, 144 Douglas, Mary, 96n31 Duai rak haeng udomkan (Wat Wanlayangkoon), 29

482

index

Dubiel, Helmut, 309 Du Bois, W. E. B., 151, 161, 182nn4, 12, 183n20 DuCille, Ann, 187n72 Du Preez, Max, 80–82, 93n16 Dürer, Albrecht, 18–20, 307, 313, 319n29 Ebden, Alfred, 283, 285, 291, 292, 296n24 Economic Values (Wirtschaftswerte) (Beuys), 20, 300, 304–7, 309–11, 315, 316n10, 317n11 Edelman, Lee, 193 Ego and the Id, The (Freud), 4, 232–33, 281– 82, 361–62 Elias, Norbert, 211 Eliot, T. S., 45 Encyclopaedia Brittanica, 8 “End of History, The” (Fukuyama), 31, 49 Eng, David L., 1–25, 343–71, 434, 435, 476 Engels, Friedrich, 279 Epistemology of the Closet, The (Sedgwick), 193 Essayan, Zabel, 9–10, 100–120, 121n6, 122nn12, 13, 17, 123n23, 125, 126, 129, 131–33, 135–42, 146 Estate Project for Artists with AIDS, 454n3 Evidence of Things Not Seen, The (Baldwin), 61 Fairbairn, W. R. D., 364 “Famine” (O’Connor), 205 Famine (O’Flaherty), 206, 208 Fanon, Frantz, 97n37, 175, 216 Farewell Symphony, The (White), 191 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 328 Fast Trip, Long Drop (video), 432, 451 Fear of a Queer Planet (Warner), 193 Fédida, Pierre, 310, 317n13, 318n28 Feijo, Benito, 316n4 Femininity Played Straight (Martin), 452 Feminist Women’s Health Collectives, 438 Fenians, 217, 222, 287 Ferguson, Samuel, 227n15 Fernández Retamar, Roberto, 22, 252–53 “Fetishism” (Freud), 416–17, 425n78 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 279 Ficino, Marsilio, 17, 249n19 Flaubert, Gustave, 1, 263 Fleurs du mal, Les (Baudelaire), 418 Foley, Timothy, 213 Foucault, Michel, 25n32, 193, 389, 391 Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, The (Lacan), 256, 275n35 Fox 2000 Pictures, 323

Fraser, Nancy, 183n18 “Free Thai” movement, 36 Freud, Sigmund, 2–4, 14, 16, 23, 32, 127, 130–32, 156–61, 174, 184nn32, 36, 215, 227n19, 232–35, 245, 248nn9, 12, 15, 251, 256, 278, 281–83, 286, 287, 293, 294, 295n20, 296n23, 307, 314, 344–47, 349–50, 352, 354, 355, 359, 361–65, 370n43, 398, 400, 405–11, 413, 415–17, 422nn36, 39, 423nn41–44, 424n26, 425nn77, 78, 432, 434, 459, 460, 469, 471 Freudian Body, The (Bersani), 196 Freud, Race and Gender (Gilman), 184n36 Fukuyama, Francis, 31, 49, 54n4 Fuss, Diana, 193, 234 Galen, 7 Gallagher, Thomas, 206–7 Gandavo, Henricus de, 17–18 Garber, Marjorie, 259, 262 Gay Marriage: Pro and Con (Sullivan), 193 Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), 429, 444, 448, 454n3, 456n28 Gedney, William, 39 Gendering of Melancholia, The (Schiesari), 157 Gender Trouble (Butler), 193 Génocide et catastrophe (Nichanian), 132, 145 German Ideology, The (Marx and Engels), 279, 294n1 Gift of Death, The (Derrida), 91, 296n20 Gilman, Sander L., 184n36, 425n60 Gingrich, Newt, 463 Ginzburg, Carlo, 141 Giuliani, Rudolph, 194 Godard, Jean-Luc, 342n18 Goldstone, Richard, 77 González Echevarría, Roberto, 258, 263, 276n48 Gould, Glenn, 311 Gramsci, Antonio, 222 Gran Fury public art projects, 431 Gray, Peter, 218, 227n17 “Great Family of Man, The” (Barthes), 69– 71 Great Family of Man, The (photographic exhibition), 70 Green, Al, 60 Gregory the Illuminator, 124n35 Griqua National Conference, 298n43 Griqua People’s Organization, 278, 291–94, 298n43

index Group Areas Act, South African (1950), 378, 393n7 Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (Freud), 347 Grundrisse (Marx), 279 Guattari, Félix, 275n29 Gund, Catherine (Saalfield), 439, 441–42, 451 Guys, Constantin, 14, 403–5, 412–17, 420n25, 421n33 Habermas, Jürgen, 183n18, 302 Hall, Mrs. S. C., 208–9, 211, 226n9 Hall, Stuart, 458, 461–63 Halperin, David, 193 Hamapatker Arewmtahay Grakanut’ean (Oshagan), 102 Han, Shinhee, 15–16, 343–71, 476 Hanekom, Derek, 298n41, 299n43 Hani, Chris, 47, 296n20 Hard Road to Renewal, The (Hall), 462 Harvey, David, 297n38 Hassoun, Jacques, 316n4, 317n14 Haynes, Todd, 439 Hegel, G. W. F., 11, 67, 83–87, 90, 91, 138, 140, 295 Heidegger, Martin, 13, 16, 324–27, 339, 341nn8, 16, 17, 342n22 Herodotus, 143, 144 Hippocrates, 7 History: Last Things before the Last (Kracauer), 6 History and Memory (video), 354–55 HIV Plus magazine, 429 Ho Chi Minh, 247 Hoet, Jan, 305–6, 310, 311 Hoffman, Eva, 145 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 14, 407–9, 414, 416, 423n44, 424n46 Holbein, Hans, 256 Hölderlin, Johann Christian Friedrich, 101 Hollibaugh, Amber, 438–39, 444, 448–49 Homographesis (Edelman), 193 Hopkins, Pauline E., 11, 148–87 Howells, William Dean, 161 Human Rights Commission, South African, 290 Husserl, Edmund, 67 Huyssen, Andreas, 316n6, 422n35 Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière (Charcot), 423n43

483

Immigrant Acts (Lowe), 248, 356 Immigration and Nationality Act, U.S. (1965), 352, 369n29 Immorality Act, South African (1927), 393n7 Immorality and Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Amendment Act, South African (1985), 394n7 In Between Days (Without You) (Sameshima), ix, 21, 232, 236–42 “Infantile Genital Organization, The” (Freud), 405 Inside/Out (Fuss), 193 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 49, 51 Interpretation of Dreams, The (Freud), 2 Irish Folklore Commission, 221–24 “Isaan” (Nai Phi), 35 “Is the Rectum a Grave?” (Bersani), 196 Jacobus, Scheel, 287 Jakobson, Roman, 312, 318n27 James, William, 155, 159–62, 172, 183n21, 185nn40, 43, 186nn56, 62 Janet, M., 186n56 Jankélévitch, Vladimir, 316n4 Jefferson, Thomas, 54n4, 165 Jen, Gish, 351 Jet magazine, 12 Jit Poumisak, 34–35, 38, 39, 44, 45, 48 Johnson, David, 6, 20, 22–23, 278–99, 476 Johnson v. McIntosh (1843), 298n39 Jones, James, 323, 324, 341n6 Joyce, James, 44 “Just One Witness” (Ginzburg), 141 Kaap Khon Nai Phi (The Kaap Khon Verse of Nai Phi), 38, 41 Kafka, Franz, 44 Kant, Immanuel, 227n19, 256, 318n22 Kanyiles, Daniel James, 291 Kasanoff, Jennie, 187n66 Kasian Tejapira, 37, 46, 54n9 Kassabian, Anahid, 130 Kästner, Erich, 308, 463 Kazanjian, David, 1–25, 125–47, 434, 435, 476 “Keens and Death Ceremonies” (Croker), 209 Kelley, Donald R., 292n8 “Kelly” (Truong), 357–58 Kennedy, Liz, 436 Ketcheyan, Levon, 121n6

484

index

“Khidtheung baan” (Missing Home) (Nai Phi), 34, 49 Khulumani (Let us speak out!), 78 King, Rodney, 59 Kingston, Maxine Hong, 348, 349, 351, 367n4 Klee, Paul, 58n48 Klein, Melanie, 359–64 Klibansky, Raymond, 7, 17, 307 Koteas, Elias, 329 Kracauer, Siegfried, 6 Kramer, Larry, 191, 195, 197, 442, 445 Kristeva, Julia, 4, 74n7 Krog, Antjie, 78 Krotoa, 385, 394n10 Kuckart, Judith, 20–21, 300, 301, 306–15, 318n28 Lacan, Jacques, 25n33, 242, 251, 256–59, 261, 262, 265, 271, 274n26, 275n35, 313, 318n20, 364 LaCapra, Dominick, 434 Land Commission of South Africa, 22, 278, 288–94, 298n41 Land League, 217, 222 Land Restitution and Reform Laws Amendment Act, South African (1997), 289 Laplanche, Jean, 196 League of Nations, 392n1 Lebow, Alisa, 442 Lefebvre, Henri, 43, 52 Le Fleur, Cecil, 298n43 Lefort, Claude, 89 “Left-Wing Melancholy” (Benjamin), 308, 313, 463 Lenin, V. I., 312 Leonard, Zoe, 429, 439, 442, 450–51 Leonardo da Vinci, 422n36 Lesbian Avengers, 429 Lesbian Herstory Archives, 429 Levi, Primo, 134 Levinas, Emmanuel, 376, 380 Levine, Lawrence W., 153 Lezama Lima, José, 253 Life Outside (Signorile), 190, 193 Like a Prayer (video), 454n3 Lin, Maya, 250n42 Living with AIDS (video series), 429, 454n3 Lloyd, David, 20–22, 205–28, 476 London Illustrated Journal, 416 Lorca, Gabriel García, 74n12 Los Angeles Times, 247

Love’s Work (Rose), 296n20 Lowe, Lisa, 230, 242, 247–48, 356, 358 Luciano, Dana, 9, 11, 148–87, 476 Ludwig, Andreas, 20, 300–303, 305, 307, 309 Mackey, Nathaniel, 59–62, 64, 74n12 Madness of the Day, The (Blanchot), 98n58 Maggenti, Maria, 429 Mahachon (newspaper), 46 Mahari, Gurgen, 111, 123n28 Mahlombe, Bafana, 93n13 Maier, Hendrik, 56n30 Malick, Terrence, 16, 323–42 Mamdani, Mahmood, 86 Man, Paul de, 91, 98n60 Mandela, Nelson, 78, 386, 388 Mangan, James Clarence, 214 “Man of the Crowd, A” (Poe), 408 Margins of Philosophy (Derrida), 296n23 Marmori, Giancarlo, 263 Marshall, John, 298n39 Martí, José, 22, 253 Martin, Biddy, 452–53, 457n30 Marx, Karl, 22, 37, 40, 51, 53, 56n31, 228n25, 278–82, 284, 286, 287, 290, 293, 294, 295n8, 296nn20, 23, 297nn27, 38, 306, 421n32, 424n51, 425n77, 472 Masereel, Frans, 396–98, 417, 418 M*A*S*H (television series), 250n42 Matshikiza, John, 299n43 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 21, 301, 307–8, 311– 14, 318n27 Mazrui, A. A., 95n25 Mbeki, Thabo, 79, 298n41 McCarthy, John, 221–22 Meditations (Descartes), 19 Melancholie I, oder Die zwei Schwestern (Kuckart), 20, 301–2, 307–15 Melancholy of Race (Cheng), 246–47 Melencolia I (Dürer), 18, 244, 307, 313, 319n29 Memmi, Albert, 97n37 Merriman, John X., 283 Metz, Christian, 240 Meyer, S., 279 Mgoqi, Wallace, 291, 298n41 Mill, John Stuart, 227n15 Min, Susette, ix, 20, 21, 229–50, 477 Mingus, Charles, 73 Mitchell, W. J. T., 424n59

index Moerdjik, Gerard, 386 Molinari, Tony, 450 Moore, Fred R., 182n4 Morgan, Tracy, 446–48 Morris, Rosalind C., 9, 11–12, 29–58, 477 Morrison, Toni, 349, 467 Moses and Monotheism (Freud), 127, 130–32, 406–7 Moten, Fred, 4, 9, 11, 12, 22, 59–76, 477 mourning after, the (exhibition), 229–31, 244, 247 “Mourning and Manic-Depressive States” (Klein), 359 “Mourning and Melancholia” (Freud), 3, 23, 159, 184n32, 232, 233, 281, 282, 296n20, 344–46, 364 “Mourning and Militancy” (Crimp), 10, 365 Mourning Becomes the Law (Rose), 296n20 “Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation” (Abraham), 158 Müller, Heiner, 301, 310, 311, 314, 318n25 Mulvey, Laura, 425n78 Muñoz, José Esteban, 363, 365 Murphy, Jeremiah, 221–22 Murray, Albert, 183n20 Museum of the City of New York, 456n28 “My Cousin’s Corner Window” (Hoffman), 408 Naidoo, Jay, 394n13 Nai Phi, 9, 11–12, 29–53 NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, 431, 432 Narai, King of Siam, 40 Natal Code (1878), 87 National Origins Act, U.S. (1924), 347 National Party, South African, 92n4, 96n34 Native Administration Act, South African (1927), 87 Navarro, Ray, 439 Ndwandwe, Nason, 93n13 New Jersey Department of Health, 446 New Jersey Women’s and AIDS Network (NJWAN), 447 Newton, Esther, 436 New York City Commission on Human Rights, AIDS Discrimination Unit, 439, 442, 448 New York Public Library, Royal S. Mark Collection, 454n3 New York Times, 189, 194–97, 200, 229, 230

485

New York Times Magazine, 191 Ngubane, Harriet, 96n31 Nichanian, Marc, 9–10, 99–147, 477 Nicoll, Ruaridh, 299n48 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 136, 296n23, 381, 388, 473n2 Nolte, Nick, 326 Northrop, Ann, 437, 450 Novalis, 43 Nuit, La (Masereel), 417, 418 O’Connell, Daniel, 217, 221 O’Connor, Sinead, 205, 219 Odets, Walt, 189 O’Flaherty, Liam, 206, 207 “Of Mimicry and Man” (Bhabha), 349 Of One Blood (Hopkins), 11, 148–81 O’Hara, Scott, 202n24 One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (Halperin), 193 One-Way Street (Benjamin), 39 “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (Benjamin), 399–403 On the Study of Celtic Literature (Arnold), 210 On the Way to Language (Heidegger), 324 Open Depot project (Ludwig), 20, 300–305, 307 Order of Terror, The (Sofsky), 147 Origin of German Tragic Drama, The (Benjamin), 313, 469 Oshagan, Hagop, 102–4, 121n8, 122n12, 127–29, 134, 142–43 Oshagan, Vahé, 135, 147n4 “Other Question, The” (Bhabha), 350 Our Nig (Wilson), 156 Out magazine, 190 “Painter of Modern Life, The” (Baudelaire), 413 Panofsky, Erwin, 7, 17, 307 “Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire, The” (Benjamin), 420n6 Pasuk Phongpaichit, 56n19 Payne, Mary, 73 Paz, Octavio, 263 Penn, Sean, 324 People in Trouble (Schulman), 429 Petrie, George, 215 Petro, Patrice, 420n26 Phelan, Peggy, 453, 457n30 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel), 83–86, 91, 136

486

index

Phibulsongkhram, 36, 37 Philadelphia (film), 431 Phillips, Adam, 362 Philosophy of History (Hegel), 85 Philosophy of Right (Hegel), 86, 146 Phin Bua-on, 52 Phong, Duong Thanh, 229, 230 Piye, Eugenia Thandiwe, 95n22 Piye, Lucky, 95n22 Place at the Table, A (Bower), 193 Platoon (film), 250n42 Pleuang na Nakhorn, 46 Poe, Edgar Allan, 408, 414, 424n47 “Politics of Friendship” (Derrida), 146 Polonskaya, Veronika, 311, 312 Pomorska, Krystyna, 318n27 Population Registration Act, South African (1950), 392n1 Power of Sympathy, The (Brown), 186n60 Poz magazine, 191 Pramoedya Ananta Toer, 44, 56n30 Préaud, Maxime, 319n29 Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations (Marx), 295n1 Preeda Khaobor, 47 Pride (video), 454n3 Pridi Phanomyong, 35–37, 55n13 Prisms (Adorno), 142 Prisons Act, South African (1959), 82 Problemata (Aristotle), 7 Prohibition of Marriages Act, South African (1949), 394n7 Property (Das Eigentum) (Braun), 300 Proust, Marcel, 342n23, 400 Psychic Life of Power, The (Butler), 4, 355, 361, 370n50 “Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman” (Freud), 314 “Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States, The” (Klein), 359 Puig, Manuel, 253 “Radicalism after Communism” (Anderson), 29 Ragland-Sullivan, Ellie, 259 Rama IV, King of Siam, 36, 46 Rama VI, King of Siam, 40, 55n16 Rambo (film), 250n42 Rand, Nicholas, 168 Rat Bohemia (Schulman), 429 Ravi Varma, Raja, 267, 269 Reagan, Ronald, 458, 463

Recognition of Customary Marriages Act, South African (1998), 97n46 Reconstruction and Development Programme, South African, 77 Rent (musical), 431 Restitution of Land Rights Act, South African (1994), 288–89 Retief, Piet, 386 Rhodes, Cecil John, 291 Ricardo, David, 279 Riggs, Marlon, 436 Rignall, John, 424n47 Roa Bastos, Augusto, 253 Rodríguez Monegal, Emir, 254 Rolston, Adam, 429 Rose, Gillian, 290, 296n20 Rose, Jacqueline, 422n36 Rosett, Jane, 452, 456n28 Ross, Andrew, 271 Rotello, Gabriel, 191–94 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 421n30 Russell, Bertrand, 71 Sackman, Karen, 74n8 Safer Sex (video series), 429 Said, Edward, 269 Saint Foucalt (Halperin), 193 Salammbô (Flaubert), 263 Sameshima, Dean, ix, 21, 231, 232, 235–43, 246–48, 249nn25, 26 Sánchez, Luis Rafael, 253 Sanders, Mark, 6, 9–11, 14, 77–98, 477 Santos, Lidia, 277n58 Sarduy, Severo, 22, 251–76 Sarit Thanarat, Field Marshal, 37 Saturn and Melancholy (Kilbansky, Panofsky, and Saxl), 307 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 66, 258, 296n23 Savigny, Friedrich Karl von, 295n8 Saxl, Fritz, 7, 17, 307 Scarry, Elaine, 12 Schiesari, Juliana, 24n26, 157–58, 234, 235 Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrih von, 227n19 Schneider, Cynthia, 439, 441 Schrager, Cynthia, 162, 176, 177, 185n40 Schulman, Sarah, 429, 438, 444 Scott, Joan, 435 Scribner, Charity, 2, 20–21, 300–319, 477 Seals, Rosie Lee, 73 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 193 Sekula, Allan, 425n60

index Seltzer, Mark, 453 Seneca Peace Camp, 438 Senior, Nassau, 218 Senna, Danzy, 343, 349, 368n11 Seremane, Joe, 290, 298n41 Serial Killers (Seltzer), 453 Sex Panic!, 194–98 Sexual Ecology (Rotello), 191, 193 Sexual Offenses Act, South African (1957), 393n7 Shepp, Archie, 74n12 Shibusawa, Tazuko, 369n25 Shilts, Randy, 188–90 Shippard, Sidney Godolphin Alexander, 283– 85 Siamanto, 99, 120n3 Siam Samai (newspaper), 35 “Siberia” (Mangan), 214 “Sick Soul, The” (James), 161 Siegel, James T., 56nn24, 56, 57n42 Signorile, Michelangelo, 189–93 Silverlake Life (Phelan), 453 Silverman, Kaja, 16, 75n25, 323–42, 419n5, 421n32, 477 Simmel, Georg, 52, 418n2 Simons, H. J., 87, 98n55 “Small History of Photography, A” (Benjamin), 410–11 Smith, Adam, 54n4, 279 Sofsky, Wolfgang, 147 “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes” (Freud), 405 Somerville, Siobhan, 187n72 Somme et le reste, La (Lefebvre), 43 Sontag, Susan, 257 Sophocles, 9, 83–84, 126, 141, 143 “Sorcerer, The” (Nai Phi), 47 Souls of Black Folk, The (Du Bois), 182n12 South African Broadcasting Corporation, 78 Southey, Richard, 285, 286 Specters of Marx (Derrida), 77, 296n20 Spillers, Hortense, 185n49 Spiro, Ellen, 429, 436, 439 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 56n31, 91, 435 Staley, Peter, 442 Stalin, Joseph, 312, 314, 316n7 Stanzas (Agamben), 244 States of Injury (Brown), 369n26 Stern, Julia, 156 Stevens, Wallace, 45 Stewart, Susan, 238

487

Storia de vous (Marmori), 263 Sturken, Marita, 431, 432 Suchinda Khraprayoon, 31 Sue, Derald W., 348 Sue, Stanley, 348 Sula (Morrison), 467 Suleri, Sara, 261 Sullivan, Andrew, 191, 193 Superstar (film), 439 Supha Sirimanond, 54n9 Supreme Court, U.S., 61 Tajiri, Rea, 354–56 Talaat Pasha, 123n22 Tangled Memories (Sturken), 431–32 Target City Hall (video), 454n3 Tate, Claudia, 164, 179, 182n3, 187n72 Taylor, Diana, 96n32 Tchicai, John, 74n12 Tellerbach, Hubertus, 155–56 Tendencies (Sedgwick), 193 Testing the Limits (video), 429, 454n3 Thai Radical Discourse ( Jit Poumisak), 34 Thakurta, Tapati Guha, 267 Thammasat University, 34 Thatcher, Margaret, 458, 462, 463 “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (Benjamin), 1–2, 313, 458 Thin Red Line, The (film), 16, 323–41 Thomas, Kendall, 78 Thompson, John Cyprian, 296n24 Thongchai Winichakul, 55n17, 58n45 “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” (Freud), 161 Threshold of the Visible World, The (Silverman), 75n25 Till, Emmett, 9, 12, 59–73, 75n15 Torok, Maria, 158–59, 168, 170, 171, 181n2, 370n43 Totale Herrschaft, Die (Arendt), 146–47 Totality and Infinity (Levinas), 376 Totem and Taboo (Freud), 307 Toussaint L’Ouverture, Pierre François Dominique, 93n10 Tran, Truong Van, 247 Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Caruth), 431 Treatment Action Group (TAG), 445 Trevelyan, Charles, 218 Triolet, Elsa, 301, 307–14, 318n28 Trubetzkoi, Eugene, 318n27 Truong, Monique T.-D., 357–58

488

index

Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), South African, 10–11, 14–15, 22, 77–91, 278, 290, 293, 294, 372–73, 375– 77, 387–88, 390, 393n3 Tucker, Henry, 286 Tydings-McDuffie Act, U.S. (1934), 347 Typical American (Jen), 351 Uberoi, Patricia, 267 United Nations, 77 “Unspeakable Things Unspoken” (Morrison), 349 Vajiravudh, King of Siam, 40, 45–46, 54n9, 56n25 van der Merwe, General Vincent, 388 Van Onselen, Charles, 299n44 Vargas Llosa, Mario, 253 Veblen, Thorstein, 421n32 Versace, Gianni, 188 Verwoerd, H. F., 92n4 Victoria, Queen of England, 283, 286 Video against AIDS, 429, 454n3 Video Databank, 429 Vietnam War Memorial, 250n42, 432 Vimol Phonlacan, 35, 57n41 Virtually Normal (Sullivan), 193 Vo, Khanh, 21, 229–32, 235, 242–48 Voght, A., 279 Voortrekker Monument (Pretoria), 385–89 Vorpouni, Zareh, 111, 123n28, 135 Warden, Major, 286 Warner, Michael, 182n7, 193–94 Warren, Kenneth, 161 Washington, Booker T., 150–51, 182nn4, 12 Waswo, Richard, 297n27 Waterboer, Nicholas, 285–88, 291, 297nn32, 38

Watney, Simon, 433 Watson, R. S., 297n32 Wat Wanlayangkoon, 29 Weinbaum, Alys Eve, 14, 396–426, 477 Wentzel, Webber, 291 Whateley, Archbishop Robert, 213 “What Is Metaphysics?” (Heidegger), 324, 326, 341n16 Whelan, Kevin, 228n23 White, Edmund, 191 Whitfield, Stephen J., 73n5 Willen, William, 292 Williams, Raymond, 363 Wilson, Elizabeth, 421n27 Wilson, Harriet E., 156, 185n52 Winnicott, D. W., 366 Wojnarowicz, David, 433, 439 Wolfe, Maxine, 437, 438, 440–41, 445, 447 Wolff, Janet, 420n27 Woman Warriors, The (Kingston), 349 Women, AIDS, and Activism (ACT UP/NY Women and AIDS Book Group), 429 Women’s National Coalition, South African, 88 Women’s Pentagon Action, 438 “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, The” (Benjamin), 409–10 “Wounded Attachments” (Brown), 453 Writers of Disaster (Nichanian), 132, 135 Wyschogrod, Edith, 391 Young Ireland, 221 Young Turks, 106, 123n22, 140 Zalaquett, Jose, 98n56 Zasulich, Vera, 280, 281 Zizek, Slavoj, 256, 271 Zondo, Aiken, 82, 94n20 Zondo, Andrew, 9–11, 81–82, 84 Zondo, Lephina, 10–11, 81–85, 89–91, 95n22

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