War and Peace

Abstract

This article attends the intersection of personal and collective memory. Drawing on the author's childhood memories, particularly those of his grandmother, the article explores the ways in which one's past is registered and reexperienced as an ongoing relation between intimate recollections and grand historical narratives. The article contrasts Homi Bhabha's (1994) use of the psychoanalytic concept of Nachträglichkeit to a parallel conception of past-present interaction in the writings of Franz Kafka (1954), Ernst Bloch (1963), and Walter Benjamin (1955). Reflecting on the heavy charge carried from the past into the future, on what Emmanuel Levinas (1995) called in this context “insoluble problems” (p. 88), the article argues for a notion of agency that reaches beyond the subject, toward a consideration of subjectivity as a focal point, and link, between collective tradition and its potential trajectory.

Notes

¹Zecharia means god remembers, or god remembered.

²Aviva is the Hebrew feminine form of Spring. The Latin meaning of “viva” must also be present.

³“The cursed Nazis killed everybody.”

⁴“The cut-out unconscious of a family line may sometimes rush, with an incredible concentration, into a mind and body too small to contain it” (Davoine and Gaudillière, 2004, p. 149).

⁵Lost in translation is the Hebrew meaning of the name Egypt and therefore the full linguistic resonance of “the exodus from Egypt” in Hebrew. The Hebrew word for Egypt is Mitzraim. The root of this word means “narrow” and in a different conjugation also “siege.” To exit Mitzraim means in Hebrew to get out of “narrow straights.”

⁶As I write these lines I recall that once, when discussing with a patient the possibility that life can be dramatically improved in very small measures, a notion drawn directly from Benjamin's (1955) “weak messianism” (p. 263) this patient, who was educated as a mathematician, recalled with great satisfaction a mathematical proof that there is more infinity, or infinitely more, between any given two points than from here to eternity.

⁷Each present day is determined by the images that are synchronic with it: each “now” is the now of a particular recognizability. In it, truth is charged to the bursting point with time …. It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words: image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is purely temporal, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: not temporal in nature but figural. Only dialectical images are genuinely historical—that is, not archaic—images. The image that is read—which is to say, that image in the now of its recognizability—bears to the highest degree the imprint of the perilous critical moment on which all reading is founded [Benjamin, 1982, p. 463].

⁸Rose Selavy was a pseudonym and alter ego of the French artist Marcel Duchamp. His/her image, Duchamp made up as a woman, or as we would say today in drag, first appeared in a 1921 Man Ray photograph. The name is a reference to the French phrase “Eros, c'est la vie” (Eros, that's life) and “arroser la vie” (to toast life).