Harvard University Press Blog

Of Ethical Memory

When it comes to war, ethical memory illuminates how war neither emerges from alien territory nor is fought by monsters. War grows on intimate soil, nurtured by friends and neighbors, fought by sons, daughters, wives, and fathers. Our ambivalence about war’s identity simply expresses ambivalence about our own identities, which are collectively inseparable from the wars our nations have fought. These are the wars for which we have paid, from which we have benefitted, by which we are traumatized. Whatever may be noble and heroic in war is found in us, and whatever is evil and horrific in war is also found in us.

When it comes to war, the basic dialectic of memory and amnesia is thus not only about remembering and forgetting certain events or people. The basic dialectic of memory and amnesia is instead more fundamentally about remembering our humanity and forgetting our inhumanity, while conversely remembering the inhumanity of others and forgetting their humanity. A just memory demands instead a final step in the dialectics of ethical memory—not just the movement between an ethics of remembering one’s own and remembering others, but also a shift toward an ethics of recognition, of seeing and remembering how the inhuman inhabits the human. Any project of the humanities should thus also be a project of the inhumanities, of how civilizations are built on forgotten barbarism toward others, of how the heart of darkness beats within. No wonder, then, that for Jorge Luis Borges, remembering is a ghostly verb. Memory is haunted, not just by ghostly others but by the horrors we have done, seen, and condoned, or by the unspeakable things from which we have profited. The troubling weight of the past is especially evident when we speak of war and our limited ability to recall it. Haunted and haunting, human and inhuman, war remains with us and within us, impossible to forget but difficult to remember.

—Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies

Polanyi in the Air

In a much discussed and very welcome piece for Dissent, historian Patrick Iber and Roosevelt Institute fellow Mike Konczal outline the resurgent ideas of the great political economist Karl Polanyi. Konczal and Iber, whose study of the cultural Cold War in Latin America we published last year, see Polanyi’s thought resonating throughout our political moment, particularly among followers of Bernie Sanders. In detailing Polanyi’s work on markets, money, and labor—embodied most significantly in 1944’s The Great Transformation—they hope to help us understand the 2016 presidential election:

Polanyi wouldn’t have been surprised by the rise of Trump. He knew that the double movement—the protective steps that people take when exposed to too much unfettered capitalism—does not always benefit the left. Trump supporters clamoring to make America great again reflect one version of this; they hearken to a time when life was more secure and stable, at least for certain types of working- and middle-class whites.

In fact, one of the reasons that Polanyi rushed The Great Transformation to press was to warn post-Second World War policymakers that poor economic institutions could lead—through the double movement—to disastrous consequences for democracy. For Polanyi, it would make sense that the Sanders and Trump insurgencies happened simultaneously, and that there are some people who would rank those two as their favored candidates, in spite of them seeming to come from opposite ends of the political spectrum. Both campaigns are based in part in complaints about the corrosive effects of exposure to global markets. Both are against so-called “free trade” and skeptical of open borders, though only Trump’s campaign is shot through with xenophobia and only Sanders wants to reform the Wall Street practices responsible for the Great Recession. Still, in spite of all their differences, both Sanders and Trump look like expressions of “double movement” politics.

In addition to the prevalence of Polanyian arguments in the public sphere, Iber and Konczal note a renewed academic interest, citing Fred Block and Margaret Somers’s The Power of Market Fundamentalism, among other recent studies. As we know, by the time an academic book is bound, its ideas often aren’t arriving on the very most sharpest point of the leading edge—which is to say that the Polanyi surge is more than just folks feeling the Bern. Indeed, as Iber and Konczal write, “The future of the party does not belong to Bernie Sanders himself, but the Karl Polanyi Democrats are here to stay.”

Creative Insurgency in the Arab World

In The Naked Blogger of Cairo, Marwan Kraidy builds on his decades of experience researching and writing about Arab media, culture, and politics to consider the ways in which people create rebellious art, attract public attention, and conjure new political imaginaries. At the heart of these processes Kraidy finds the human body, employed as tool, medium, symbol, and metaphor, tying the revolutionary activism we associate with the Arab uprisings of recent years to those of a longer past.

The book develops the notion of “creative insurgency” to explore the mixture of activism and artistry characteristic of revolutionary expression, turning to the work of dozens of sloganeers, graffiti artists, puppeteers, videographers, cartoonists, satirists, and bloggers to explore a series of cross-disciplinary questions about practices of rebellion:

How does creative insurgency emerge and thrive? What kinds of artistic practices does it spur? What debates does it foment? How has creative insurgency evolved in different periods and places? What do self-immolations in 1963 Saigon and 1969 Prague reveal about Bouazizi’s in 2010 Sidi Bouzid? How does Mubarak’s switching off the Internet in 2011 resonate with the British ban on theater in 1919 Cairo? What historical perspective can we gain by revisiting the French Revolution? Can the aesthetic sensibility of Delacroix’s La liberté guidant le peuple help us grasp the Naked Blogger of Cairo? What can we learn about political street art in 2010 Arab capitals from civil war–era stencil graffiti in 1970s Beirut? How do loaf-brandishing revolutionaries and the superhero Captain Khobza in 2010 Tunis echo past bread riots? How does Top Goon—Diaries of a Little Dictator recast ancient puppetry traditions for the digital era? Is revolutionary graffiti mere political messaging or is it art? How has creative insurgency evolved in different periods and places?

Kraidy gives a more complete sense of his project in the video below.

 

The Writer’s Technique in Thirteen Theses

Walter Benjamin’s One-Way Street, first published in 1928, is a central example of the early twentieth century’s “montage books,” and also one of the finest bursts of Benjamin’s brilliant, concentrated prose. In his introduction to our new edition of the work, Michael Jennings describes One-Way Street as seeming to offer its reader “a jumble of sixty apparently autonomous short prose pieces: aphorisms, jokes, dream protocols; cityscapes, landscapes, and mindscapes; portions of writing manuals; trenchant contemporary political analysis; prescient appreciations of the child’s psychology, behavior, and moods; decodings of bourgeois fashion, living arrangements, and courtship patterns; and, time and again, remarkable penetrations into the heart of everyday things.” To Jennings, One-Way Street represents not a loose aggregation of prose, but Benjamin’s first attempt “to create a text as a highly theorized constellation of fragments.” That the work fits together is of course no prohibition on appreciating its pieces alone. Here, then, from Edmund Jephcott’s translation of One-Way Street’s “Post No Bills”: Benjamin’s “thirteen theses” of the writer’s technique.

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The Writer’s Technique in Thirteen Theses

I. Anyone intending to embark on a major work should be lenient with himself and, having completed a stint, deny himself nothing that will not prejudice the next.

II. Talk about what you have written, by all means, but do not read from it while the work is in progress. Every gratification procured in this way will slacken your tempo. If this regime is followed, the growing desire to communicate will become in the end a motor for completion.

III. In your working conditions, avoid everyday mediocrity. Semi-relaxation, to a background of insipid sounds, is degrading. On the other hand, accompaniment by an étude or a cacophony of voices can become as significant for work as the perceptible silence of the night. If the latter sharpens the inner ear, the former acts as touchstone for a diction ample enough to bury even the most wayward sounds.

IV. Avoid haphazard writing materials. A pedantic adherence to certain papers, pens, inks is beneficial. No luxury, but an abundance of these utensils is indispensable.

V. Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.

VI. Keep your pen aloof from inspiration, which it will then attract with magnetic power. The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself. Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it.

VII. Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Literary honor requires that one break off only at an appointed moment (a mealtime, a meeting) or at the end of the work.

VIII. Fill the lacunae in your inspiration by tidily copying out what you have already written. Intuition will awaken in the process.

IX. Nulla dies sine linea [“Not a day without a line”]—but there may well be weeks.

X. Consider no work perfect over which you have not once sat from evening to broad daylight.

XI. Do not write the conclusion of a work in your familiar study. You would not find the necessary courage there.

XII. Stages of composition: idea—style—writing. The value of the fair copy is that in producing it you confine attention to calligraphy. The idea kills inspiration; style fetters the idea; writing pays off style.

XIII. The work is the death mask of its conception.