No. There is a general impression that by collecting memories, remembering, preserving history and acknowledging the past we are at better odds not to ‘repeat the errors of the past’. It is based on this supposition that different mechanisms for ‘not-forgetting’ are put into practice. That being said, in this essay I will argue that assigning an end (telos) to memory, from the work of memory and mourning to the ‘duty of memory’ through justice, is problematic. And not only that, but it is our attachment to a collection of discourses, memories and histories, bounded to the concept of law and justice, which makes impossible to get out of a cycle of violence that never stops. The mechanisms that are put into place to avoid forgetting ‘our past’ rather that avoid falling into the same mistakes, perpetuate the inherent violence they are originated from. This essay does not aim to contribute to a progress or development of any sort of memory or law mechanism, on the contrary, it challenges the idea of law and the discourse of having to ‘come into terms’ with the past.

Starting with Paul Ricoeur’s phenomenology of memory, I will draw attention to the notions of pure memory, memory-images and memory as a cognitive practice, remembering, in order to set a conceptual framework for the essay. Then, I will revisit his use of psychoanalysis for the transition from private memory to collective memory, plus his inclusion of identity into memory and remembering, to develop a critique of identity and collective memory, which will be complemented by retaking the division between singularity and identity of Felix Guattari. Furthermore, I will develop this into a critique of society as a concept of a collection of identities through law, from which I will analyse the notions of transitional justice and criminal trials and their links with memory, ideology and violence. In this context, I revisit Walter Benjamin’s Critique on violence to take firstly, the notion of the inherent relationship between law and violence, and secondly, the cycle of violence in which, through law and our current political and economic framework (institutions, apparatuses, ideology), we are immersed. From this analysis, I will establish a quire rhizomatic connection between memory, identity, society, law, justice, which will allow me to continue to develop a critique of the ‘collective’ and ‘collectivisation’ of life that we are experiencing on various places around the world that have been historically considered societies with a ‘rough’ past i.e. postconflict societies. Finally, I will revisit the theoretical way out that Georges Sorel and Benjamin offer us, not to propose a solution or give a tentative conclusion to the question, but rather highlight the complicity of the ‘possible solutions’ to the perpetuation of the ‘errors’ of the past.

Paul Ricoeur’s Memory, History, Forgetting, is a crucial and extensive analysis on the phenomenology of memory, which I will use as a start point for this essay. Said book reflects on various aspects of memory and its use, as well as provides a fundamental theoretical background for this essay. Here, I retake his analysis on the existence of a ‘pure memory’ which cannot be directly accessed, and rather it is recollected, brought into light, through memory-images; a process which ends up altering memory irremediably, with unknown extent and consequences to that who remembers. We have to understand that this transition between the ‘pure memory’ which is ‘recollected’ and ‘brought into presence’ as a virtual memory-image does not brings the object, what is brought into light is the ‘imagined object’s “not-being-there”’. Avoiding this distinction between ‘to imagine’ and ‘to recall’ can put us at risk to ‘void the absence and distance with the object’, thus ignoring the issues that this setting into images of memory brings, a ‘pathology of the imagination’ which paves the way for hallucination and obsession. The latter is probably Ricoeur’s most relevant analysis for us, as it is here where we can start visualising a political dimension to memory theory. When he warns us not to fall into the traps of imagination, he does so to avoid what he calls hauntedness. ‘Hauntedness is to collective memory what hallucination is to private memory, a pathological modality of the incrustation of the past at the heart of the present…’. From this phenomenological process previously described, Ricoeur develops a transition from private to collective memory through psychoanalysis, which, as he argues, is ultimately justified by identity: ‘the bipolar constitution of personal and community identity that, ultimately justifies extending the Freudian analysis of mourning to the traumatism of collective identity.’

The intersection between memory and identity proves problematic as: ‘everything that compounds the fragility of identity also proves to be an opportunity for the manipulation of memory, mainly through ideology’. As stated before, the lack of access to ‘pure memory’, thus the need to the construction of impure memory-images, reconfiguration of the process of recollection of the singular, does not allow for a fixated individual identity, neither individual nor collective. As Guattari argues ‘identity and singularity are completely different. Singularity is an existential concept, whereas identity is a concept of referentiality, of the limiting of reality to frames of reference, frames that may be imaginary’. Here, it is necessary to reflect on the tensions between singularity and identity on the context of society to understand the issues of the transition from ‘private’ to ‘collective’ memory. As per the diagnosis of The Invisible Committee: ‘Society is always a society of individuals. […] So that to think of oneself as a social being is always to apprehend oneself from the exterior, to relate to oneself as an abstraction.’

This idea of ‘apprehend oneself from the exterior’ speaks directly on the first part of this criticism. The development on discourses of diversity and inclusion must be understood on the contemporary context where neoliberalism has taken control of the multiplicity of apparatuses, ‘managing’ risk and contingency for the benefit of the markets. Identities are produced in a way that they are functional to the apparatuses which produced them. It can be argued that the ideas and concepts behind the creation of nation-states and societies has not merely be based on identity, but the current overflowing of them and the development of the notion of ‘intersectionality’ share a concept in common with the 16th century idea of politics: representation. To speak about identity is to relegate the existence of the singular to mere frames of reference which are imposed from the exterior. ‘Society presents itself as the superior entity that aggregates all the individual entities’. This collection of individual entities is possible thanks to the creation of meaningless bonds between individuals and oneself.

We don’t suffer from being individuals, we suffer from trying to be that. Since the individual entity exists, fictitiously, only from the outside, “being an individual” requires remaining outside oneself, strangers to ourselves, forgoing any contact with oneself as well as with the world and others. Obviously everyone is free to take everything from the outside. One only has to keep from feeling, hence from being present, hence from living.

Here, what is at stake is the disappearance of the experience, hence existence. Most of the continental political theory that has been developed since Hobbes, has been focused on the notion of the ‘social bond’: that external entity that arises from an event that never took place (myth), which will procure and care about the individual by giving them liberty through law and justice. It does not matter the diversity of identities that can be collected or ‘represented’, the underlying issue around this model is the fact that it misses the ontological element of the singular and their becoming, the contingency of existence is aimed to be managed, difference is aimed to be interpreted and digested. ‘To gather around shared identities is to repeat and affirm the naming that ultimately marks us as criminal, as killable, as rapeable in the first place.’ The sensus communis is that it is just a matter of appropriating said apparatuses, in order to become the hegemonic ruling corpus that has the possibility to put into work ‘their own’ ideology, being able to exercise the ‘changes’ and ‘reforms’ that ‘are needed or required’ for, in our context, liberal democracy, ‘to work’.

Two main analysis can be derived from this: the first one, the notion that it is the ruling hegemony which decides what is/was an error and what is/was not, being precisely here where discourses on the use of memory are justified, and by justified I mean the notion of the transformation of the work of memory to the duty of memory through justice. And the second one, which is the main argument of this essay: it is not about what we do not remember, but what we do not let go, that is, assuming the current political, legal and justice frameworks and concepts as immutable, intertwined with the idea of progress and development. Here we can retake the notion of hauntedness, the past at the heart of the present, that Ricoeur talks about; and, as we can see, the exercise of deciding what could be regarded either as a ‘noble endeavour’ or ‘the past leaking into the present’ is analogue to that of deciding what is/was an error and what is/was not. As Hito Steyerl argues, ‘the museum has to render the tank (the past) useless upon entry’. And it is precisely this ‘uselessness’ that we must ‘transfer’ to memory to fully grasp the possibility of breaking the cycle of violence in which we are surrounded.

Regarding some of the most recent examples of the use of memory as a project, transitional justice mechanisms and international justice institutions, we can visualise that without a proper reflection and criticism to the concepts of law and justice, any sort of attempt to avoid repeating ‘traumatic’ past is unattainable. For this, we must understand that it is thanks to the violence through which any law is funded, lawmaking violence, that law is bound to its original status of unlawfulness ergo can be challenged and replaced by another law. But not only this, even an endeavour for peacebuilding, through the restoration of the rule of law, unveils its inherently violent trait, law-preserving violence. Every attempt to reconcile/pacify a ‘country/society’ which underwent a period of ‘mass violence’ and ‘trauma’ has to be understood as an inherently political and ideological project. And in our contemporary context, states and multilateral organizations aim to include said postconflict societies into a series of rules and regulations that are compatible with the current global hegemonic ideology, in this case neoliberalism. As Ricoeur argues, it is ‘the relation of the duty of memory to the idea of justice that must be interrogated’. But not only this, a criticism to the concept of justice must carried on to fully grasp the relationship between memory, politics and violence; here, I will focus on the criticism of the concept of justice through law.

In the case of debates and criticism towards international criminal trials, as Tor Krever analyses, ‘by directing attention to issues of legalistic procedure or geopolitical calculi, mainstream debates distract from and even blind us to the ideological role of trials in constructing and conveying symbolic forms that sustain often asymmetric and violent international social relations’. A similar analysis of the diversion of the criticism could be extrapolated to ‘previous’ and ‘alternative’ forms to approach ‘law and justice’; but here I retake two analysis that acknowledge the relationship between law, justice and ideology. Regarding criminal trials:

‘A criminal trial, Kennet Nunn suggests, “does more than merely determine the fate of the defendant standing trial”. It also expresses “fundamental notions about justice and injustice, right and wrong, law-abiding and crime, good and evil”. By labelling particular conduct as deviant, the trial mobilizes censure and social sanction […] The trial thus can be seen as a “communicative forum”, a “social practice for producing authoritative judgements of discourses” about society.’

On the case of transitional justice mechanisms, as Catherine Turner argues:

‘The new model [of transitional justice] represents a break from the need to trade justice against peace, and promises a future in which peace will be based on justice. The emergence of this concept of transitional justice is also intimately linked with the narration of the ‘end of history’, whereby the end of ideological conflict created the conditions for a universalised and post-political language of human rights and international justice.’

To enquire further on this remarks and critique of justice through law, I will follow one of the arguments that justifies the creation of multilateral transitional justice institutions: the reestablishment of the rule of law to what is perceived as events of ‘mass and collective violence’. From this we can start unveiling the relationship between violence and law. On Critique on violence, Benjamin aimed to reflect on a critique of violence which did not require to go through law, a ‘violence can first be sought only in the realm of means, not of ends.’ From this, he theorises two modes of violence which are antagonistic to each other, mythical violence and divine violence; being law the main component to this dialectical division. If we follow Saul Newman’s remarks, we will find that ‘violence is violent through its relation to law, whether it is the violence that preserves the legal system or violence that overthrows the legal system only to found a new one in its place,’ thus this cycle of violence, tied to law and justice, it is mythical violence. This is the reason why, by avoiding any sort of moral judgement in this essay, we can understand that it does not matter if the ruling hegemony streams from ‘the left’ or ‘the right’. This ‘antagonism’ shares a common event of violence which opened the way for all of them to appropriate the apparatuses (and create or reform them as well). The ‘political’ consensus at the level of institutional politics that Sorel talks about, in contrast to the proletarian general strike, shows that there is a common ground which goes without any sort of criticism or challenge, as in doing so, paving the way for a different kind of politics. This is the challenge of our contemporary context: to avoid falling into the cycle of violence, we must not only reflect on the issues of memory, forgetting and trauma, but challenge (destitute) the political framework in which this reflections take place. Another term that must be reflected on is the ‘postconflict society’. The diagnosis of a society regarded as ‘postconflict’ comes after the evaluation of a society that underwent a process of violence, which magnitude of damages, period of time and/or parties involved exceed what could be considered tolerable, a ‘society torn apart’. The apparent ambiguity on which said distinction is set, comes with a consensus on what is regarded as exceptional and/or traumatic. This consensus, as an analytical tool, merely serves to designate the ‘state of things’, the issue begins when it escapes the hermeneutical realm and aims to gets hands on and ‘do something about it’, the transition inherent in the post, ‘beyond conflict’. Under this notion, there is always a series of assumptions that go unchallenged: the creation of a new nation-state, the reconstruction of society, to deliver justice and reinstate the law. As we can see, there is a framework which is constantly repeated, without any questioning, and the fact that it ‘makes sense’ speaks about the ideological and political component of the consensus itself. It does not matter how much we focus on specific events and examples, if we are unable to challenge what is thought as given and immutable, we are just feeding into a cycle that basically needs criticism to perpetuate its existence.

But as we can see, the term postconflict here serves as adjective to the term society. The issue with this is that our criticism could be understood only within the limits of said adjective, rather than acknowledging the full extend towards the concept of society; it is not only after the ‘trauma’ when it gets rotten, I has been all along. As the Invisible Committee argues ‘there’s a flagrant disintegration of “society,” certainly, but there’s also a move aimed at recomposing it’ in our contemporary context.

Liberal society’s maneuver, at the moment when it can no longer hide its implosion, is to try and save the particular and particularly unappealing nature of the relations that constitute it by replicating itself in a proliferation of little societies or collectives. Work-based, neighborhood-based collectives, collectives of citizens, of activists, of associations, of artists, etc., collectives of every sort are the future of the social. […] The more “society” falls apart the more the attraction of collectives will grow. They will project a false escape. This scam works all the better as the atomized individual becomes painfully aware of the freakishness and misery of their existence. Collectives are designed to reintegrate those whom this world rejects, and who reject it.

This turn into the ‘co-’, in almost every realm of our existence, should be understood as an example of how easily criticism is consumed and digested by institutions and hegemonic discourses. The disintegration of a social welfare state towards a collective society aims to veil the real interest of this process: the governance of the multitude through debt and finance management.

The World Bank is all about microcredit, “reinforcing the autonomy and empowerment of poor people” (World Development Report of 2001), cooperatives, mutual societies—in short: the social and solidarity economy. “Promote the mobilization of poor people into local organizations so they can act as a check on the state institutions, participate in the process of local decision-making, and thus collaborate to ensure the primacy of law in everyday life.” says the same report.

The collectivisation of life streams from globalization and ‘the decay of society’. This new order of life, the (re)subordination of institutional politics to economy, the commodification of life and its inclusion into the logic of finance and profit, speaks to a political project based on the annulment of our singularity, frames of reference employed to merely agglomerate people within several permeable and dynamic frontiers. The ‘real’ has been delimited to a certain regulations and standards, i.e. economy feasibility determines what is ‘real’ and what is not by creating a distance between the singular and the contingency of its existence. This notion of the ‘real’ speaks directly to the relation of the duty of memory with truth/ faithfulness; and insofar it is based on an exercise of judgement through law, it is a political exercise as well. This relationship has promoted an immense variety of projects which aim to establish ‘the real’, ‘the truth’, ‘the proof’, ‘objective history’ through memory for diverse ends.

… imposed memory is armed with a history that is itself “authorized,” the official history, the history publicly learned and celebrated. A trained memory is, in fact, on the institutional plane an instructed memory; forced memorization is thus enlisted in the service of the remembrance of those events belonging to the common history that are held to be remarkable, even founding, with respect to the common identity. The circumscription of the narrative is thus placed in the service of the circumscription of the identity defining the community. A history taught, a history learned, but also a history celebrated. To this forced memorization are added the customary commemorations. A formidable pact is concluded in this way between remembrance, memorization, and commemoration.

It is thanks to our dependence on the other to account for our existence, to hold ‘our narratives, our history’, that we see as an ultimate goal the inclusion of our traumas, suffering and unsettled past in the narrative of the ‘official history’, blinding us from acknowledging that it is this ‘official history’ which ultimately creates the conditions of our oblivion. Here the other must be understood as that collection of narratives which encompasses a delimited series of identities one must fit into, a series or laws and regulations one must comply with, a series of institutions and governing apparatuses that one must acknowledge. It is thanks to the sameness of memory that we have a framework of reference with which we can interpret the world, ‘the real’, but this also simultaneously distancing us from experiencing it. The contemporary phenomena of institutions acquiring and fostering their archives could have its origins on this notions. Here, by understanding that we are complicit with our non-existence and the perpetuation of institutions by several processes of subjectivation, Ricoeur’s claim is confirmed, just with small tweaks: everything that compounds the strength of memory also proves to be an opportunity for the normalization of identity, mainly through ideology.

The constant ‘subjective’ violence to which we are constantly encountered with, opens two dialectical paths: one that calls for the restoration (either new or old) of the rule of law and justice, the reparation of damages and the ‘return to peace’ thus ignoring its ‘objective’ violence; something which, as this essay has argued, will takes us back to a nonstop cycle of violence, as it is bounded to repeat its own foundational violence over and over again. The second path is the complete disengagement with this cycle of violence. Sorel made this distinction through his theorisation of the political general strike, which intents ‘…not to destroy state power but to exercise a greater political control over it and to wring concessions from the capitalist class…’ against the proletarian general strike, ‘which embodies the radical dissolution of state power through the affirmation of workers’ autonomy and direct action…’. Drawing from Sorel’s ideas, Benjamin theorises a violence which opposes to the cycle of mythical violence: divine violence. This divine violence is derived from the pursuit for ‘other kinds of violence than all those envisaged by legal theory’; a ‘pure immediate violence’ that ‘halts mythical violence’, invisible to men, which existence, if assured, furnishes ‘…the proof that revolutionary violence, the highest manifestation of unalloyed violence by man, is possible…’.

What is clear now is that there is not a guarantee that errors of the past can be avoided through the exercise and duty of memory, and in fact, all this efforts that are being carried away on an institutional level through the discourse of law, peace and justice are deepening and fueling the errors they claim they want to avoid. Memory should not have an end, should not be transformed into a project. Only a complete disengagement with the system, a destitution of our economic framework, can get us out of the cycle of violence: ‘it’s a matter of jumping outside the circle of killers’.

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