Solidarity with the Past and the Work of Translation: Reflections on Memory Politics and the Post-Secular Max Pensky, Binghamton University In the notes for his never-completed magnum opus the Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin quoted a letter from his colleague Max Horkheimer’s letter, sent from the United States on March 16, 1937. Horkheimer had written Benjamin complaining of the attempt, in the latter’s essays, to develop a theory of historiography that held interruption and shock, rather than scientific explanation, as a methodological first principle. The implication of this theory, for Horkheimer, was a theological view of history in which the past, for the historian, was not yet finished. Its incompleteness – the still-undetermined fate of the dead – exerted both ethical and political demands on the historian, whose work both redeemed the otherwise obliterated memory of historical suffering, and directed that memory to the present with practical political intent. “The determination of incompleteness is idealistic,” Horkheimer insisted, unless “completeness is not comprised within it.” Past injustice has occurred and is completed. The slain are really slain…If one takes the lack of closure entirely seriously, one must believe in the Last Judgment…Perhaps, with regard to incompleteness, there is a difference between the positive and the negative, so that only the injustice, the horror, the sufferings of the past are irreparable. The justice practiced, the joys, the works, have a different relation to time, for their positive character is largely negated by the transience of things. This holds first and foremost for individual existence, in which it is not happiness but unhappiness that is sealed by death. 1 Benjamin’s entry continues with his own commentary on Horkheimer’s claim: The corrective to [Horkheimer’s] line of thinking may be found in the consideration that history is not simply a science but also and not least a form of remembrance. What science has ‘determined,’ remembrance can modify. Such mindfulness can make the incomplete (happiness) into something complete, and the complete (suffering) into something incomplete. That is theology; but in remembrance we have an experience that forbids us to conceive of history as fundamentally atheological, little as it may be granted us to try to write it with immediately theological concepts.1 This response brings us immediately to Jürgen Habermas’s view that the features of a post- secular age demand a post-metaphysical form of philosophy, and that this, in turn requires the ongoing work of translation in which philosophy finds ways of recovering the semantic potential of theological concepts, norms, and images without depending on an idealism that the times will no longer allow. In accusing Benjamin of lapsing into idealism, Horkheimer had concluded that the capacity to take a normative perspective on the fate of historical victims of injustice depended on the presupposition that the fate of those victims was somehow – this “somehow” and its relatives being a word we will encounter frequently in what is to follow – not finished, not closed. Of course, Horkheimer did take Benjamin as ever suggesting that historical remembrance could make the slaughtered any less slaughtered, though this unfortunate and unkind expression has lived on. Benjamin was, strange as it may sound, making a Kantian point. While no retroactive 1 Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 478. 2 justice may be possible for the dead, the finality of the significance of their deaths, and the relation between that significance and the present, could only be modified under the premise of an agency transcending the causal completeness of experienced historical time. The possibility of a transcendent agent – God – can no more be refuted than affirmed through discursive thinking. But for Horkheimer, even the attempt to think beyond discursive categories, as Benjamin did, and refashion a form of interruptive memory [Eingedenken] into the medium of historical time requires a transcendent perspective, an idealism that was Horkheimer’s scourge in the 1930s. Horkheimer’s allergic response to Benjamin’s so-called idealism expresses one of the most basic ambitions of his early thought: revealing that metaphysical philosophy is complicit in the masking and perpetuation of concrete human suffering. Religious consolation, the offering of transcendent ideals that offer illusory alternatives to real historical misery, always depended on irrationality, on taking experienced reality as unreal. But in the wake of secularization and the loss of the convincing power of religious norms and symbols, Horkheimer saw consolation as a mere byproduct of philosophical metaphysics, which appropriated the old religious symbols as part of a claim of reconciling thought to its own material conditions in this world. For Horkheimer, Hegel had already accomplished this dubious goal of superseding religion, claiming that while religious consciousness offers transcendence as consolation, philosophy performs transcendence by transfiguring the very reality it thinks, reconciling lived historical time with spirit, adopting a retrospective that shows the concrete reality of historical happiness as ephemeral and meaningless to spirit; suffering and wickedness as only apparently unjust, or only unjust from the necessarily limited viewpoint of lived time.2 2 Horkheimer’s thought from the 1930s attempted to develop a consistent materialism that, negatively, would register the active work of repression and forced forgetting necessary to carry out this idealist project. The internal connection between morality and memory would later, in the 1940s, correspond with the connection between reification and the forgetting of suffering that Horkheimer and Adorno would 3 This exchange, truncated and unfinished, has come in the decades since to stand for a debate, internal to critical theory, that has lived a remarkable afterlife in the works of Habermas and his critics. The entwinement of theological motifs and the condemnation of concrete forms of injustice survives, in altered form, in Habermas’s most recent reflections on the processes of translation between religious and secular language, and between theological and post-metaphysical philosophical concepts.3 The first kind of translation characterizes the work of a discursively structured democratic public sphere whose members struggle to come to terms with a conflicted and burdened identity, a shared ethical life. The second refers to the philosophical labor of philosophy as it struggles to gain access to the semantic resources of theological concepts without falling back behind the frontier of post-metaphysical thinking. In the question of the normative status of the dead, of those whose unjust deaths continue to ramify for consociates whose lives both appropriate and necessarily lose touch with the dead, this double act of translation is, as I hope to show, crucial. This essay analyzes Habermas’s continuing reference to Benjamin and the possibility of a normative relationship with posthumous persons – a solidarity with the dead—as a way of framing a set of questions about the nature and limits of this translation work. What is it that characterizes the status of the dead as a translation problem in the first place, and what is at stake in the task of finding secular equivalents for the relevance of the past? What would a successful (with the caveats that have to characterize this) translation look like, and what would necessarily have to resist translation? And finally, how would a successful translation play out in the ethical-political debates of a society, usually a national society, struggling to come to terms with a burdened past? indicate, but not ultimately explore, in Dialectic of EnlightenmentSee the section “Le Prix du Progres” in the notes and marginalia to Dialectic of Enlightenment: “All reification is forgetting.” 3 On the double nature of translation, see Simone Chambers, “How Religion Speaks to the Agnostic: Habermas on the Persistent Value of Religion,” Constellations 14:2, June 2007, 210-223. 4 Habermas’s discourse theory describes collective ethical-political discourse in the public sphere as shared projects at self-understanding. A social group, even a society as a whole, undertakes to interpret its collective identity. From the midst of more or less taken-for-granted sources of collective identity, shared traditions come under critical scrutiny: a society no longer recognizes the power of a tradition to bear shared meanings unproblematically from one generation to the next, and examines, possibly for the first time, the meaning and justification of a tradition in light of new experiences. In the light of new experiences a collective finds itself compelled to ask ‘who we are,’ which of our otherwise taken-for-granted ways of understanding ourselves we now must interrogate, justify, and possibly reject. In the ‘wild’ arena of more or less un-institutionalized public political life, a society forms a new opinion of its own identity, and this deliberation can depend neither on the tried and true bases of its own political culture (for this may be just what is up for debate) nor on the formal institutions and rules of parliamentary procedure (for it is just this structured discourse that ethical-political debates are meant to influence with their opinions). We should accustom ourselves to picturing the standard case of a society-wide ethical debate as hard. When identity is at stake, feelings run strong. The questioning of sources of belonging is not a pleasant experience even in the best of times. Discourse is costly by any measure, and in an important sense highly impractical and inefficient. To launch and sustain a serious and prolonged ethical-political discourse, a society must have undergone some experiences destabilizing enough, maybe even traumatic enough, to compel such a debate, often against individuals’ and groups accurate sense of their own best interests. Something must be very wrong, in other words, for a society’s members to engage voluntarily in a public debate that has the potential to deprive them of 5 basic forms of orientation, of things that are familiar and meaningful to the conduct of life, to find itself in the midst of a public discourse about ‘who we are, and who we want to be.” This last formulation, one familiar from Habermas’s own work, can be misleading regarding the typically destabilizing, disturbing, disorienting, and disruptive aspects of ethical-political debates in the democratic public sphere. The formula tends to downplay the centrality of the retrospective dimension of ethical-political debates. By this I mean that uncontroversial instances of such debates – ones that are relatively sustained, largely distributed and visible across a broad spectrum of a national society, widely participatory and not merely passive consumption of high-visibility books, movies, television spectacles and the like – are primarily fights over the interpretation of a proximate collective past, and only secondarily about a society’s future. And to be a source of a hard debate, one that undertakes to hold up shared norms, values and traditions for critical scrutiny and possibly rejection, the recent collective past is, generally, a very bad one, a violent one, and one that has left many, many victims behind. How to deal with that past, how it’s compatible with a society’s image of itself and the normative basis for its continued existence, is memory politics. Memory politics, in other words, is the quintessential form collective ethical-political discourse. And memory politics arguably has less to do with who or what a society is and who or what it wishes to be, than with what a society has done, or allowed to be in its name or with its tacit consent; what facts about its past it would prefer to forget but finds it cannot; how its unavoidable past compels it to transform or jettison its cherished norms as bankrupt or failed; what, given what has happened, a society wishes no longer to be. While the hopeful-sounding formulation of ‘who we wish to be’ is certainly always present in such debates, those moments in the public life of a society that are able to generate sufficient momentum and duration to qualify fully as ethical-political debates do so largely as a result of a past that will not go away – a past of massive injustices, and 6 widespread political and moral culpability that so undermine any possibility of naïve trust in the integrating norms of political culture that no recourse to them is possible any longer, absent some public justification of their continuing validity. Until relatively recently, the prominence of the past in ethical-political debate was generally understood in functionalist terms: collective memory, shared norms and values, and above all a shared identity based on a common history all implied that the past serves generally as an important source of social solidarity, binding social members in an inclusive we-consciousness. Disturbances to that generally consensual past ought on functional grounds to be resolved either by political or other means, in order to avoid overstressing and possibly undermining the social solidarity necessary for a society’s continued existence. But the experiences of the twentieth century have altered this generally functionalist view of the past entirely. The rise of a putatively global regime of universalistic moral and legal discourses in the wake of the Second World War ran in tandem with a growing suspicion of the nationalist projects supported by a functionalist view of memory politics. Control of national memory came to be seen as an integral part in the suppression and marginalization of victimized persons and groups. A far more agonistic view of memory politics, based on negotiation and open political contest, made far more visible what was normatively at stake in struggles over collective memory. The most dramatic, surely, of this new range of phenomena within memory politics was the claim that the dead, specifically the victims of past political violence, imposed a form of moral obligation on the living, and that in the context of post-conflict struggles over memory, this obligation placed real limits on a present society’s ability to bracket off elements of its shared past that were threatening to social solidarity.4 In this sense, the ‘debt to the past” has often been taken as 4 Pablo De Greiff among many others has located perhaps the single definitive use of this concept in the political public sphere: Bundespraesident Richard von Weizsäcker’s Speech in the Bundestag during the 7 a sort of deontic constraint, limiting the free hand societies have to negotiate a consensual view of the shared past that might otherwise be desirable from the perspective of political reconciliation, institutional efficiency, or other pragmatic considerations. But what it is, exactly, that a present can owe a past – whether this formulation is indeed anything more than a bit of dramatic rhetoric intended to strengthen one side or another in an ethical debate – remains far from clear. What is clear, however, is that this claim, central for current debates over collective responsibility, reparations and apology, political forgiveness and reconciliation, is a crucial site for the translation work from religious to secular concepts, as Habermas has described it. Habermas himself has himself done a great deal of this particular translation work himself. As the single most influential figure in the ethical-political discourse that fundamentally reshaped Germany’s national self-understanding, Habermas was already actively practicing a crucially post- secular philosophical reception and transformation of the ‘semantic potential’ of religious language, a fact that comes out most clearly in his reflections on the Benjaminian idea of a solidarity with the annihilated victims of injustice. While many readers of Habermas have been struck by the special status of this “anamnestic solidarity”5 in his work, the more recent writings on religion in the public Ceremony Commemorating the 40th Anniversary of the End of the War in Europe and of National Socialist Tyranny, May 8, 1985. In Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective, Geoffrey Hartman, ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 265, quoted in De Greiff, 5. 5 This term, not entirely satisfactory, was coined by Christian Lenhardt: “Anamnestic Solidarity: The Proletariat and its Manes,” in Telos [000], 133-154, which appropriates Horkheimer’s generational logic, arguing that a future generation that has attained justice, in order to avoid the problem of unredeemable debt to the past generations that Horkheimer described, must redeem its debt to the oppressed past by taking seriously the neo-Paganism that Benjamin’s own time-consciousness implies. Lenhardt tries to illustrate this modern, reflexive ancestor worship with the (ancient Roman) practice of the Manes: the dead as a collective, neither individuals nor gods, who tended to meddle constantly in the affairs of the living, who interact with them with a combination of pity and dread. Without much of an argument, Lenhardt suggests that this notion, superimposed on a modern time-consciousness in which subsequent generations may be keenly aware of the happiness and peace they enjoy only at the expense of the suffering of earlier generations, establishes a strong impulse to devise ritual forms of remembrance in the form of thanks, appreciation, honor, and affection for the dead and their sacrifices. Alternatively, the manes may be taken as demanding justice in the form of revenge, a theme that Lenhardt already sees in Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of religion that may have influenced Marx’s own views of revolutionary time. In other words, Marxism demands a form of (secularized) ancestor worship in which the past continually demand via a need for remembrance the status of a just revolution as a continuous act of vengeance. 8 sphere help us understand the centrality of solidarity with the dead in a more powerful and nuanced way. For here, in the appropriation of this Benjaminian trope, Habermas is performing, rather than simply describing, the doubled translation that his work on the post-secular does not always clarify. Postwar Germany is the paradigm case of a wrenching and protracted ethical-political debate over the future of national memory, and has served as a constant reference point for subsequent memory-political debates in post-conflict democracies. In fact no other national society has had such a sustained politics of regret, a memory politics that comprised the basis of (West) Germany’s political culture. But as they served as the model for subsequent post-conflict political cultures, Germany’s experiences during the postwar half-century were also so distinctive as to be sui generis. First and foremost, of course, is the sheer scale and magnitude of the political violence of war and genocide and the corresponding devastation of national traditions that postwar German society had to cope with. Moreover, given the annihilation of its Jewish minority, postwar Germany had little pressure to find the bases for political accommodation and reconciliation amongst former adversaries within one pluralist society. This fact, coupled with widespread collaboration or at least tacit acceptance of violence amongst the population, made victim-perpetrator relationships far more complex and stark than in any other comparable post-conflict society, foregrounding the self-reflexive relationship of a population with its own deeds and victims, rather than the far more pragmatic theme of finding new modes of political stability amongst former enemies. These facts, coupled with the extreme destruction of the physical basis of German society, the intense pressure of international politics in the beginnings of the Cold War, and the overall underdeveloped state of German political culture even in the prewar era, made the lengthy repression of memory and the ‘inability to mourn’ of German society in the first half-century of Germany’s postwar era understandable. And, if at least 9 the metaphorical language of collective psychology is permissible, it’s also understandable how this long period of enforced forgetfulness and repression, once it eroded and finally broke at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, could produce such dramatic results in the culture of memory that took hold in its wake. In the famous “Historians’ Debate” from the second half of the 1980s, Habermas argued against a loose group of ‘conservative historians’ such as Ernst Nolte, Michael Stürmer, and Andreas Hillgruber that Germany’s postwar legacy was simply incompatible, on normative grounds, with the kind of re-appropriation of pre-war traditions of German political culture that could provide relatively robust sources of patriotic, particularistic national identity. His opponents, in particular Stürmer, shared a widespread sense in the 1980s that, with the passing of the wartime generation and the renewal of Germany’s place as a “normal” state and a key member of the Western political and military alliance, the near-constant focus on Germany’s sins, and the ubiquitous questioning of the validity of the country’s national traditions and identity, were producing a sort of national malaise and disaffection, a degree of disorientation and lack of healthy national attachment, that could have potentially disastrous political consequences for a key European state. Perhaps it was time to end, or at least dampen, Germany’s apparently insatiable appetite for self-castigation, to draw a quiet close to the nation’s pariah status, and begin to lift some of the stigmas of German national self- confidence and self-assertion. Against the trend toward relativizing the scale and originality of the Holocaust as part of a strategy of diminishing Germany’s collective responsibility, Habermas, in a now-famous series of interventions in newspapers and journals, excoriated his conservative opponents for their cynical maneuvers to rehabilitate bankrupt cultural traditions. For Habermas, the legacy of the ‘break in civilization’ of war and genocide was not – could not possibly be – a wholesale rejection of German 10