I CONTINUE TO THINK ABOUT Benjamin in order to understand the right to wage public criticism against violence, but also to articulate the values of cohabitation and remembrance—the values of not effacing the active traces of past destruction. These may well be Jewish things to do, but, if they are, they are also non-Jewish things to do. My contention from the outset of this book is that the relation with the non-Jew is at the core of Jewish ethics, which means that it is not possible to be Jewish without the non-Jew and that, to be ethical, one must depart from Jewishness as an exclusive frame for ethics. There are various ways to understand this mutual implication of Jew/non-Jew. I do not, for instance, accept the Sartrean formulation that the anti-Semite creates the Jew. I am trying, rather, to delineate a political ethics that belongs to the diaspora, where Jews are scattered among non-Jews, and to derive a set of principles from that geographic condition and transpose them onto the geopolitical reality of Israel/Palestine. Although I will elaborate on those principles in the chapters on Arendt and in the final chapter on Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish, especially relating to the rights of refugees, for now I wish to suggest that the historiographical presumption of progressive history that supports the idea of Zionism as the unfolding realization of an ideal can and must be countered by a critique of that form of progressivism, and Benjamin can assist us in formulating such a critique. This can be accomplished, in part, through an alternate reading of the messianic that focuses on preserving the history of the oppressed against oblivion. What is more, the messianic depends on a notion of scattering linked with social heterogeneity and converging temporalities, both of which contest those forms of political nationalism that depend on founding and continuing forms of expulsion and subjugation.
In thinking about the history of the oppressed, it seems imperative to recognize that such a history can and does apply to any number of people in ways that are never strictly parallel and tend to disrupt easy analogies. I will take this up more fully in my chapters on Hannah Arendt. But I would like to draw upon Arendt briefly here to suggest that one might usefully read Benjamin’s late references to the messianic in relation to her notions of plurality and cohabitation. The link is not immediately clear, to be sure, but perhaps it becomes more so when one considers how the history of the oppressed, referenced in Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” is linked with the status of the refugee or, indeed, the stateless in Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. Benjamin sought to identify those moments in which the history of the oppressed emerges in a flash, even as a sign of danger, breaking through or interrupting the continuum of history that goes under the name of progress. The homogeneity he opposed was the one that threatened to monopolize temporality in the form of continuous history. The homogeneity Arendt opposed was one that belonged to the nation-state, the unity and sameness of the nation, which she thought could not stand as the basis for any state. She had two basic claims to make in this regard: the first was that any state founded on a homogeneous idea of the nation is bound to expel those who do not belong to the nation and so to reproduce the structural relation between nation-state and the production of stateless persons. The second is that for any state to have legitimacy it must accept and protect the heterogeneity of its population, what she called its plurality. At some points she seems to suggest that that heterogeneity belongs to all countries starting sometime in the nineteenth century, or at least it becomes an explicit problem for the nation-state after Westphalia. But at other points she seems to establish an ontology of plurality: the plurality of any and all populations constitutes the precondition of political life, and any political state, policy, or decision that seeks to eradicate or limit that plurality is racist, if not genocidal.1 Here, as elsewhere, I pursue Arendt’s conjectured indictment of Eichmann toward the end of Eichmann in Jerusalem when she explicitly claims that he wrongly thought he could choose with whom to cohabit the earth.2 In her view, cohabitation was a precondition of political life, and though one could, to some extent, choose with whom to share a bed or a neighborhood, one could not choose with whom to cohabit the earth. That cohabitation remains the unchosen condition of all political decisions, if those political decisions are not to be genocidal.
Whereas Arendt in the late 1940s pursues this thought of unchosen cohabitation in relation to a federated Palestine, and then again in relation to the American Revolution, it is in each case a refusal to accept national or religious grounds for citizenship. Though, in her terms, everyone has a right to belong, existing modes of belonging do not ground or justify that right. Writing two decades earlier, Benjamin worried less about the grounds of citizenship and the formations of the state than in a kind of history whose forward motion left all sorts of debris, some of which was human debris, or, rather, we might say in the spirit of Kafka, the debris may once have been human, but its current contours are barely conceptualizable—Odradek and his sort. Do regimes of narrative power treat the stateless as so many forms of debris, strangely animated, bespeaking a history of dispossession that is refused? Is there still some form of history there, packed into that animated object, that partially humanized ruin? Of course, that figure appears very differently once a different kind of history can be told, but perhaps Kafka is helpful in a limited way here. He lets us see the figural form that a muted history takes. If the history of the discarded or oppressed is covered over by a progressive history whose subject now lays claim to the subject of rights, then we have to ask about the form of that effacement. An expulsion has already taken place—someone or something has become a refugee, without audible language or status. And as history moves forward, the expelling continues. So there is no single deportation of the oppressed, but a reiterated action, an ongoing process of deportation, land confiscation, or expulsion that functions as the condition of possibility of that sense of progress. That forwardly propelled subject and the history of the oppressed are thus linked together, and we are asked to consider a double movement: propulsion and expulsion, working at once, without a clear end in sight.
If Arendt has the stateless in mind, as she does when she considers the massive deportations from Europe in World War II and the simultaneous and resulting problem of large numbers of refugees, she continues to have it in mind when she objects to that form of political Zionism heralded by Ben-Gurion that defeated her coauthored proposal for a federated binational authority in Palestine. She predicted a new refugee problem, not merely one that would happen during the Naqba of 1948 to over 750,000 Palestinians, but one that would continue to happen as the State of Israel moved forward as a nation-state on the model she rejected and thought everyone should reject. She could not have predicted the nearly five million now living under occupation, in refugee camps, or in the diaspora as a consequence of 1948 and 1967, but she did predict that the making of the refugee could not cease under the political conditions of the nation-state3. Her call for cohabitation was an effort to assert an unchosen plurality on an egalitarian basis as the precondition for legitimate politics, and it was meant quite clearly to counter the genocidal politics of National Socialism and the recurrent production of the stateless by any and all nations that sought to homogenize the nation by purging it of its heterogeneity. As the homogeneous nation moves forward, it not only covers over the history of that past; it continues to spit out and pile up those who are no longer supported by a history that would establish them as subjects. They are, rather, expelled from the nation as so much debris, indiscernible from a littered landscape.
I do not want to meld these two positions together, even though we know that Arendt was profoundly indebted to Benjamin, even as she quarreled with what she thought were his more mystical moments. I want, however, to focus on Benjamin’s notion of remembrance. After all, it would seem that remembrance functions in an inverse relation to the progressive history he explicitly criticizes in “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In this sense, remembrance is not about demonstrating or telling a history, and neither is it finally about the excavating and subsequent monumentalization of a past, as he makes clear in The Arcades Project. Importantly, remembrance works against history, undoes its seamless continuity; the homogeneity in Benjamin’s history seems internally related to the homogeneity of the nation-state in Arendt. Both engage the question of how populations are differentiated, some of whom are propelled forward, and others cast out and deformed in the casting, at least from the perspective of the victors.
What flashes up—or who flashes up? And in what way can a history be said to flash? It takes no narrative form, but emerges as a sudden and provisional light. Is this the sort of dangerous mysticism that my critical theory friends warn me against in Benjamin? If not, how are we to understand that light that interrupts that history, that propels and expels at once? And does it interrupt it only for a moment, or can it stop or change the course of that progress? What do we make of this moment?
One might wonder how his early work might bring us close to understanding something I am calling the politics of remembrance. In “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin makes reference to a strange sort of flashing up that seemed to be the sudden emergence or breaking forth of another temporality into one characterized by its uniformity and its progress. It appears suddenly and disappears. Benjamin writes, “the true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again” (TPH, 255). Or later, “to articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was.’ It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger [wie sie im Augenblick einer Gefahr aufblitzt]” (TPH, 255). Something flashes up, but something also flashes through a historical continuum, understood as the “historical progress of mankind” that has instituted and even naturalized time as “homogenous and empty” (TPH, 261). Sometimes it seems that this flash comes from an explosive device, as when he remarks upon “the awareness [of the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action] that they are about to make the continuum of history explode” (TPH, 261). Apparently this moment of action converts empty time into full time, but this experience seems to belong to the historian rather than the activist. The understanding of how the past continues to enter the present brings one into greater proximity with “the time of the now,” understood as “shot through with chips of Messianic time” (TPH, 263).
Now shooting through might seem to return us to the idea of explosives, but maybe in fact we are asked here to find explosive consequence in the work of history. Those chips that have shot through present time clearly interrupt its homogeneity. Something outside homogeneous and empty time is found lodged within its trajectory in parts, in fragments, in chips, as if something were broken off from its original material integrity as an object. If these chips are the messianic, then we will not find the messianic in the form of some human; the messianic will be neither anthropomorphism nor event. Rather, it will be something broken off, shooting through; or broken off, having shot through, and now flashing up. We learn in the sixth thesis that the Messiah will not only be understood as a redeemer, but as “the subduer of Antichrist” (TPH, 255) (“Der Messias kommt ja nicht nur als der Erlöser; er kommt als der Üeberwinder des Antichrist”),4 but we don’t quite yet know what is standing for Christ. Yet, Benjamin does write in the final line of those theses, “every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter” (TPH, 264), a wonderfully Kafkan formulation, which suggests the messianic has to be understood as something of a wager. It is not that a messiah will come or has come, but rather that what we can call messianic is always on the order of the “might enter.” Here again, we have a sense of one force entering a certain established temporal horizon, and here it is not quite shooting through or flashing up, but simply entering, as one enters a gate or enters through a door, some opening onto another time. What enters through that door is not a figure, but that disruption to temporality or, indeed, an alternative temporality. It matters which one we choose, since on one reading—one that is surely supported by the text—the messianic puts an end to time and constitutes “a cessation of happening” (einer messianischen Stillstehung des Geschehens).5 But, on another reading, some forgotten set of histories, those that belong to the history of the oppressed, flashes up and makes a sudden claim. On the first reading, the point is to stop history as we know it, to go on strike against the current temporal regime, and even not to act. But, on the second reading, a certain reconfiguration or reconstellation of present time takes place in which the forgotten history of the oppressed may well enter into or through the strait gate. We might even say that the memory explodes into the present and that someone called a historian, someone whose practice is remembrance, seems to be crucial to this inauguration of “now-time.” The historian is not a messiah, and yet something of the messianic emerges here, perhaps as the time of an emergency brake pulled on history, but also by virtue of something flashing up or shooting through that calls for urgent attention.
Sudden illuminations have a history in Benjamin; they are associated with scattered angels and unredeemed histories. It might be useful to offer a brief genealogy of the flash in Benjamin’s work to understand what it means for the flash to flash up into an established historical continuum and to figure out what this means for remembrance, but also, tangentially, for cohabitation. I ask these questions of Benjamin’s text to make a certain wager, to imagine what it might be to have the history of the oppressed enter, to interrupt, transfigure or light up, stall, reconstellate the time of the present otherwise understood as a kind of marching on—progress as the temporal form of destructive propulsion. The seamless forward march not only leaves its debris, but that debris becomes ahistorical, if not atemporal, by virtue of the effacements performed by progress. We might think in general that in politics we have to be on the side of progress, by which we mean that we have to choose between going forward and falling backward, but neither is really the case. Perhaps we have to ask how certain forms of progress, themselves the history of the victor, efface another history, one that belongs to the vanquished, and how that nonhistory nevertheless makes itself felt, exercises its demand, disorienting the very terms of progress. If what is meant by progress is a movement of destruction, vanquishing, and effacement, then only on the basis of such a disorientation and cessation can we begin to distinguish progress from moving forward, since moving forward would consist then in a moving away from progress. Benjamin holds out not for a different time but for a “true picture” of the past, one that allows it to take spatial forms. Some luminous and transient shape will flash up, something that can only be a disfigurement within the order of figures and not exactly a human form.
Here Kafka seems to be knocking on the door, or already within the threshold, especially his figure of Odradek from “Cares of a Family Man,” that wooden spool with a laugh that sounds like the rustling of leaves, who seems to have no fixed abode.6 The descriptions of Odradek are impossible: he, if he is a he, is a set of remnants from another time when there might have been leaves that made that sound, when we were the sort of being who could hear them. Now it seems Odradek is constantly, endlessly, falling down a set of stairs in what appears to be the family home, raising the question of whether he was once someone’s son, and this happens not once but time and again. Indeed, Odradek seems to inaugurate a time of infinity in his current state. If Odradek carrries echoes from another time, he also survives, painfully, as the figure for the recurrent and endless time of the present. We cannot quite ask what can come from Odradek or for what state of alienation he stands. The only question is whether Odradek might be a chip, a part-object, or a ruin descended from a once integrated object belonging to a former time or whether Odradek is the barely scrutable name for a present in which the breakup of anthropomorphism takes place in the name of the messianic, taking place again and again, without aim or end.
Significantly, as a barely scrutable figure, Odradek flits by, which makes me wonder whether Odradek is “the true picture of the past” that Benjamin claims “flits by” (das wahre Bild der Vergangenheit huscht vorbei).7 If the figure were fleeting, then we could simply say it is transient. But if it flits, it is engaged in a peculiar kind of activity, one engaged by a light and fast body. Although it seems that true picture of the past flits by only once, perhaps we need to pay closer attention to the formulation Benjamin provides. Here is the line again: “The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.” OK, but then we have to ask whether it flits by and can never be seen again only once or whether it continually flits by, never to be seen again. In other words, is there a never-to-be-seen-again quality to this image that continues in the present in the way that Odradek seems to outlive his narrator and dwell in that household, even though he has no fixed abode? I am not sure what it would mean to recognize or grasp hold of (festzuhalten) such an image: it is visual for us only in and as passing time. If this is a true picture of the past, it is not a truth that corresponds to that past; on the contrary, it is a true picture of the past as it breaks into the present and continues there. In Benjamin’s words, “to articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’” (TPH, 255). Recognition takes another form; it gives us neither permanence nor objectivity. Rather, what recognition “means [is] to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger” (TPH, 255). And again that enigmatic phrase: “The Messiah comes not as the redeemer, but as the subduer of the Antichrist.”
It would be odd to seize hold of the Messiah, but we can imagine all kinds of interesting art that might try and do that. In this phrase translated as “seizing hold,” one seems to grab him by the collar, as if he were some kind of ruffian needing to be wrestled to the ground. But if the messianic is precisely beyond anthropomorphism and teleology alike, then it seems to be the name not for a man or for a body but for another time, for a figure who, like Odradek, is not quite scrutable in human form. Or perhaps the Messiah is merely another name for this time, one that comes from the past, entering, as if from a future, or at least in such a way that the temporal sequence is itself confounded. If it is a memory of suffering from another time, it is not exactly one’s own memory; indeed, such a memory belongs to no one, cannot be understood as anyone’s cognitive possession; it is circulating, shattered, lodged in present time; it seems to be a memory carried by things, or the very principle of their breaking up into pieces, perhaps in the form of part-objects, partially animated and partially inorganic and strangely divine; something flashes up from this nonconcepualizable amalgam, something that is decidedly not substance: light, and shape, sudden, but also, oddly, chips exploding and lodging and flashing up. Its effect is to interrupt, reorient, or pull the break on the politics of this time. It is memory that takes momentary shape as a form of light, recalling the kabbalistic sephirot,8 those scattered and quasi-angelic illuminations that break up both the suspect continuity of the present along with the amnesia and expulsion it ritually and seamlessly performs. In the seventeenth thesis it seems clear that whatever brake on history is pulled, whatever “cessation of happening” takes place—if it does take place at all—is a wager about what will happen. The wager takes place, even though it belongs neither to the continuum of history nor to its future unfolding.
The messianic introduces a break into the narrative of inexorable unfolding that belongs to some versions of historical materialism. What is produced at such a moment, or at such a juncture, is, in Benjamin’s words, “a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past” (TPH, 263). To fight for the oppressed past is not simply or only to document it, much less to give it monumental form. Rather, it is a certain breaking apart of the amnesiac surface of time, so that what seems to be moving toward us, what might be entering the gate, is a memory as it acts upon the present, a memory that takes fragmented and scattered form. We no longer know precisely what kind of time we are in when we suddenly have the chance to fight, apparently as historians, for the oppressed past. We do not seek to redeem that past, to make it better, or indeed to use it as the basis for a new nationalist dream. Things have to remain undone, neither collected nor assembled too swiftly into new forms. Benjamin’s remembrance enacts a resistance to the swifter resolutions of Hegelian desire. The point, if I understand it, if I have recognized or seized hold of these textual moments in the course of reading them, is to seize something called a “chance,” or what I call a “wager,” for a different now-time. The problem is not that there was once a history of suffering that now needs to be excavated and recollected. Rather, the history of suffering continues as erasure continues, and as progressive narratives proceed, especially those that belong to the nation, they require and reenact that erasure, taking the following form: “You were never injured, and we are not to blame.” The denial of the injury reinflicts the injury, and that denial or, indeed, disavowal, is not only the precondition of progress, but its reiterated activity. One temporality is denied, turned to debris, precisely as and through the propulsive narrative of progress. So what is the wager? The history of the oppressed might break through the history of the victor, destabilize the claim to progress, pull the brake on that motor of pain called progress. And if that is true, can we say that this is also progress? Or is it something else? Is it the time of the wager, the temporality of chance? Something may enter, something might happen—a strange sort of possibility lodged in history. If effacement continues in the history of affliction, then what flashes up is precisely the history of the oppressed not as something that did happen but something happening still. And if the emergency brake is pulled on such a history, then the effacement through which affliction is continued is brought to a halt. Well, not quite. There seems to be a chance that this will happen, but the messianic, if we recognize it here, seems not to be an event, not a happening, but the chance, the sudden fragility of an inexorable progress, the exploding from within of an amnesia that denies the history of suffering and so continues that history.
We still don’t know quite what do with the flash of the messianic, even though Derrida remains our guide here, since he wrestled at least twice with Benjamin’s angelic illuminations.9 Perhaps we can take a cue from Derrida and return to an earlier piece, one in which oppression and the fragments of Marxism make no clear appearance. Benjamin concludes his essay “On the Mimetic Faculty” with a reflection on the possibility of translation between languages.10 His predicament is the one of Babel in which we are left to understand how various languages might, with equal efficacy and divergent means, refer to the same thing. Benjamin makes claims about the nonsensuous similarity between words that links different languages and facilitates a convergence of nonsimilar names at the site of the same thing. Benjamin accepts the heterogeneity of languages, but insists that that heterogeneity is sensuous. The similarities are nonsensuous: we cannot see or demonstrate them, but they are activated in any and all acts of reference that take sensuous form. Obviously, we cannot discover what links such words together by inspecting their morphology or their phonemic composition. Nothing in their sensuous manifestation lets us see likeness. And yet there seem to be occasions on which this similarity gives us a chance to recognize its operation. In Benjamin’s view, a similarity becomes available to us more often through the written than the spoken word. In other words, the written word illuminates, gives off light, sometimes more effectively than the spoken one. Interestingly, Benjamin invokes here as well the unconscious of the writer who leaves his traces in written words, and those words become what he calls in “Doctrine of the Similar” “an archive of nonsensuous similarities, of nonsensuous correspondences.”11 Here it seems that whatever is unconscious in the act of writing installs concealed images in the writing itself. Importantly, the archive that is handwriting is not settled and sealed for good, since someone continues to write, or someone continues to read; as a result, the archive continues to act, to flash up on occasion, and to make its strange sort of history known. Flashes and flames are all over this text, appearing some years before the theses on history, but not, I would suggest, without relevance to the latter text.
In “On the Mimetic Faculty” Benjamin writes that “the mimetic element in language can, like a flame, manifest itself only through a kind of bearer. This bearer is the semiotic element.” He continues, “thus the coherence of words or sentences is a bearer through which, like a flash, similarity appears” (722). Does coherence bear the flash, or is coherence established in the course of some activity? Elaborating then on the mimetic element, the semiotic element, even to similarity, he continues: “For its production by man—like its perception by him—is in many cases, and particularly the most important, tied to its flashing up. It flits past” (722). Oh, so much flitting: messianic flashes, Odradek, and even earlier, the nonsensuous similarity between words from different languages—a mimetic element fused with a semiotic one. In this early essay, his last remark on the topic refers to the “rapidity of writing and reading” that “heightens the fusion of the semiotic and the mimetic in the sphere of language” (722). So he has been investing in light and flame for some time, but even here the mimetic element, so fundamental to all language, is described as “like a flame”—which means that the analogy recapitulates the mimesis it attempts to explain. There seems to be no way out of that circuitry of mimesis, but this flash-up of light, what he here calls its manifestation, turns out to be conditioned by an ongoing activity, the rapidity of reading and writing. Some bearer is needed, the traces of the human hand, or some kind of script, and without that bearer there is no flash of similarity. Are these divine sparks, are they the fusion of mimesis and semiosis, or are they in some sense both? Something happens in reading and writing. Perhaps this is what is meant by the task of the historian. Something from an unconscious domain surges up and passes by, but it proves to be already lodged in the writing itself. Writing attests to a history it cannot narrate, and something is densely scattered throughout script, making it like an archive or, rather, making likeness into that nonsensuous link that fuses languages at their core, makes translation possible, but also defers infinitely its utopian promise.
In much of Benjamin’s writing, what is being elaborated cannot be held conceptually with a maximum of precision. This does not mean that it is confused, but rather that there is something to be grasped and recognized at the border of the concept that will be important for the question of the past and even for remembrance. In “On Language as Such and on the Languages of Man,”12 Benjamin writes, “there is, in the relation of human languages to that of things, something that can be approximately described as ‘overnaming’: the deepest linguistic reason for all melancholy and (from the point of view of the thing) for all deliberate muteness. Overnaming as the linguistic being of melancholy points to another curious relation of language: … overprecision” (73). There is such a thing as naming too much or naming too well. If such a practice produces melancholy, it is because the name seeks to capture its object and so risk its erasure. After all, there are always other ways to name what we seek to name, and if we take the name we use too seriously, or if we wield it too tenaciously, then we assert the necessity of the name and thereby fail to realize the other languages and the other names that approach this object with equal right. In other words, we have to remain comparativists when we name, and it would be a mistake to take one national language as the privileged site for naming. Indeed, we not only lose all those other languages, and the entire sphere of nonsensuous resemblance, but in our certainty that our naming practice is the most definitive we fail to realize what we have lost: hence, our melancholy. Something must reverberate with something else; otherwise we cannot recognize the flash. And if there is an archive of the unconscious that takes form in writing or gives off some sparks there, then we refuse the archive when we name too much or too well or when we think that, through ever more refined forms of precision, we will capture the object. This archive seems linked to the history of the oppressed for which we must continue to fight; that history is termed “an enormous abridgment” (TPH, 263) or “unfathomable abbreviation.”13 Perhaps we need to be more distracted, as Baudelaire was said to be, in order to be available to the true picture of the past to which Benjamin refers. Perhaps, at some level that has implications for the political point I hope to bring out here, a certain disorientation opens us to the chance to wage a fight for the history of the oppressed, not to reverse or redeem that history, but to let it interrupt into the present to bring about a “now-time.”
Can we think about this strange temporal insurgency in relation to the later text on history? Are those messianic chips not precisely illuminating, flashing up, or flaming in ways that offer sudden, passing interruptions of present time? Or is it rather that we have to be provisional situationists, seizing the chance to fight when it appears? If what we fight for is the lost history of the oppressed, we do it within the present precisely because that loss is occurring still and constitutes the underside of the progressive history we tell in “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” One can surely make use of such a model to understand how certain histories of loss and oppression continue to happen even when they have apparently ceased to happen: the genocide of indigenous peoples, the continuing history of the disappeared in Argentina. But it might usefully be understood as well in light of the history that is called 1948: what is hailed by some as the founding of the State of Israel and the establishment of a permanent sanctuary for the Jews and what is mourned by others as the Naqba, the forcible dispossession of over 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and lands during the weeks and months when the State of Israel was founded, which has led to the disenfranchisement of millions of Palestinians at the present time.
Is there a way to relate these Benjaminian reflections to the propositions made by Said about the possibility of two diasporic conditions converging on the land of Palestine? As we considered in chapter 1, Said identified the exilic condition of the Jewish people with that of the Palestinian people and asked whether such histories might not produce the possibility of a new politics for those lands in which the rights of the refugee would be paramount, in which no one would be excluded from citizenship in an effort to minimize heterogeneity. In this way, he reiterated Arendt’s point of view: never again should there be a group of permanent refugees who are actively dispossessed of land and rights in order to shore up a state that bases itself on a religion, ethnicity, principles of national sameness, or race. His point, and hers, was to bring an ethic based on heterogeneity, usually associated with diasporic thinking, back to the question of binationalism. My suggestion is that this formulation also opens the question: can binationalism be the deconstruction of nationalism? Of course, such questions are more easily posed by those who live within forms of the militarized nation-state, but much more difficult for those who have yet to see a nation. And Palestinian nationalism is itself an internally complex matter, sometimes linked to a state project and sometimes not.14 And yet it seems that any national striving has to deal with its “outside”—both the alterities within and without—and with a commitment to the postnational in the name of global cohabitation.
In his “Conversations with Brecht,” Benjamin offers an alternative to Brechtian interventions, insisting instead that “the true measure of life is remembrance.”15 Brecht is figured within this reconstructed dialogue as accusing Benjamin of “Jewish fascism.” It’s a rough moment to be sure, since Brecht is suggesting that this “remembrance” business has some mystical elements, ones that would take Benjamin away from a more proper activism. But in what way is there a flash of activism in this remembrance? And why is it the measure of a life, anyway? In a volume entitled Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory, edited by Ahmad Sa’di and Lila Abu-Lughod, Benjamin appears a few times.16 First, the text opens with a narrative from anthropologist Rema Hammami, who tells the story of finally finding the childhood home of her father in Jaffa, a home he lost in 1948, which had been in his family for generations. The inhabitants show her a mural and then explain that she needs to understand the truth of the story of the triumphant return of the Jews to the lands of Palestine. It is the lecture on Jewish redemption she receives that leaves her shocked and mumbling. The site of enormous loss, one transmitted through generations, comes up against the narrative of the victor. But the narrative of the victor is also the narrative of the resolution of suffering and exile into nationalism. Is there another way to approach this problem of suffering without the narrative conversion into a redemption story? One loss might have reverberated with another loss at such a moment, which is not to say that the losses are the same, but only that some act of translation across language and history could have been possible there, might still be possible somewhere.
The introduction states, “we are not as concerned about what these memories tell us about the past (although we think they contribute rich material to the ongoing reconstruction of the events of 1947 and 1948) as we are with the work they do, and can do, in the present” (2). The introduction also notes that Benjamin is among those who claim that “history is partial and is always written by the victors,” but, they add, “memory is one of the few weapons available to those against whom the tide of history has turned. It can slip in to rattle the wall” (6). Much of the volume seeks recourse to trauma history, and the sense of time articulated on the basis of this work, much of it based on the Nazi genocide against the Jews, emphasizes the continuity of a history that most sequential narratives consider to be past.
One essay on trauma in Palestinian film remarks upon the “continuity of pain and trauma, reaching from the past into the heart of the present, as well as a continuity of struggle.”17 The author, Haim Bresheeth, transposes the work that Cathy Caruth has done on trauma in the concentration camps, not because the two historical situations are the same, but because the temporality of trauma crosses both domains. He notes that several recent films, including Chronicle of a Disappearance and 1948, recall Benjamin’s “Angel of History”: “who, looking backward over history, can see only the piles of rubble and destruction, a cacophony of massacres and privations” (TPH, 175). He points out how often the films made in the past decade struggle against amnesia: “while it is impossible to assume amnesia in the case of Palestinians living in Israel after 1948, a sort of forced public amnesia was experienced by [that community] for decades.… The conditions for remembering and commemoration did not exist because Israeli rule prohibited any such activity” (175). Indeed, legal struggles continue today to contest the censorious consequences of a bill that now prohibits the public funding of any educational or artistic representation of the Naqba as Israel celebrates its independence. In another essay entitled “The Politics of Witness,” Diana K. Allan relays her conversations with older memories in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon.18 She objects to the nationalist Palestinian efforts to recruit such memories for the purposes of constructing a single national memory. What she finds are fragments of memories that are not useful for such political appropriations. The memory of uprootedness becomes itself a deracinated memory. She identifies a “paradox that lies at the heart of traumatic experience, in which forgetfulness and a breakdown of witnessing are inextricably linked to the act of remembrance, as the event is neither fully recalled nor erased” (266).
There is a note appended to this last sentence, and it references again Cathy Caruth, Dori Laub, and Shoshana Felman.19 What they write is applicable to the scenes Allan describes, but not because she is drawing some equivalence between those modes of suffering or drawing any causal connections or inverted analogies. No one here is saying that the Jews inflicted on others what they themselves suffered. On the contrary, there is something on the order of resemblance or even resonance, and perhaps one should not overname at such a moment, for fear of losing the reverberation that is most important to seize upon and recognize. Indeed, Primo Levi testified to the breakdown in witnessing in his own work, underscoring the moments in which forgetfulness overcame his will to remember well. And here Caruth is cited in explaining the broken testimonies of the Palestinians who survived the loss of their worlds. In the context of traumatic memory, one is positioned “between the elision of memory and the precision of recall” (281).20
Abu-Lughod cautions, in the introduction to Nakba, that although most trauma studies based on the Nazi genocide are useful, even “brilliant,” such studies sometimes run the risk of reproducing Jewish exceptionalism. Perhaps Benjamin’s remembrance, as something that seizes upon resonances that make translation possible, offers a slightly different way to go, one that cannot and will not stay within the frame of the nation, one that presupposes heterogeneity and even sustains affiliation with Arendt’s notions of cohabitation. Perhaps this leads us back again to the quite remarkable suggestion made by Said that perhaps two exilic peoples might establish principles of social justice on the basis of their converging and resonant histories of dispossession. To do so means interrupting the progressive narrative of Zionist redemption, or rather taking stock of what it produces and continues to produce, as so much inscrutable debris. Those who seize the chance to fight for the oppressed past are indeed in a struggle to transmute suffering into political claims for justice, especially when there is no historical guarantee that justice will develop or manifest in time. Indeed, the time of the now is the time in which that destruction, like other destructions, has the chance to be recognized, a recognition that would change our very sense of time, would let the time of the oppressed enter into the time of the victor, at which point there might be a chance for something else.
If remembrance is the true measure of life, it is doubtless bound up with the true picture, with truth in various forms of modality. But the modalities at issue are neither seamless narratives, national histories, nor monuments that praise governments or bespeak their power. Remembrance attends to the way that history acts now as well as to what opens up within that reiterated history to reclaim the history of the oppressed. The measure of a life is the way that history continues to act in the present, which means, of course, that the presence of those contingent moments accumulate, chances or wagers, flash upon flash, a struggle for the past, which is the only way to transform the present. Perhaps the messianic takes aim precisely at redemption and in this way is the “Antichrist.” Somebody’s memory is interrupting someone else’s march forward, and perhaps this happens precisely because something of that suffering over there resonates with the one over here, and everything stops. Remembrance may be nothing more than struggling against amnesia in order to find those forms of coexistence opened up by convergent and resonant histories. Perhaps for this we still do not have the precise name.