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GLOBAL MEMORY: THOUGHTS ON THE BARBARIC TRNASMISSION OF CULTURE, por Homi Bhabha Conferencia dictada en el Townsend Center for the Humanities, University of California, Berkeley, 14 de Abril de 2008. It's a great honor to be here. If you didn't live in such an extravagantly beautiful place, with such fantastic weather, if you lived where I lived you wouldn't be here, I thank you very much for giving up a Friday afternoon to be here. Now, I want to thank Professor Tony Cascardi, who has been remarkably generous to me. We have been trying to set this date for a while. I'm very happy to be here, thank you so much Tony. And, to the assistant of the center, assistant director Therese Stycauff(sp?), thank you for all of your help. And, indeed for the help of the others who worked in the center I am most grateful. A wonderful thing about going to give talks is that you get to know everybody from your friends to the entire administrative structure of many institutions, and you appreciate how much is actually done, as it were, behind the faculty lines. And, I thank you all for being here, very much today. Now, confronted with the crowd like this on an afternoon, I think I should have been much more entertaining than I am going to be. I should have clearly followed the habits of consumer capitalism and produced for you some charming and delightful things that could snatch off of the supermarket shelves. Unfortunately, I worked a little too hard , and I think I will have to work you a little hard. But, like most of the charming captains that we have these days, I shall tell you when to fasten your seat belts and get through the turbulent areas...of theory. Because, of course after all, you know, one of the things that I have been honored to be know for is not to be understood widely. An honor I have also shared with a wonderful friend I have at this University. But, let me just give you a road map of what I am going to do today. This talk really is about cultural memory and cultural heritage. And, the text I don't want to sound as if I am speaking from the pulpit in church, but the text for the day is something all of you know very well, and some of you know much better than I do. There is no document of civilization, which is not at the same time a document of barbarism and just as the document is not free of barbarism, barbarism also taints the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to the other. And this became for me very suggestive over the last few years when I kept thinking what will we transmit, of the barbarism in which we are involved now? How do we transmit that barbarism? What will happen what does Walter Benjamin mean in these lies as you are well aware, from the Thesis On History. What does he mean when he talks about the document, that barbarism taints the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to the other. What is this form of transmission, how do you transmit barbarism? What does it mean to be able to transmit barbarism,

without being taken over by it but in fact in order to transmyth it, you have to reproduce it. Trauma is not simply something that howls from a distance but it is something that has to be reconstituted and dealt with and models of repression and working through are not entirely adequate so I've tried to confront this problem for you and with you today. I start off then, by looking at what I see as the contemporary messianic moment in contemporary politics and I do that by looking back at T. S. Elliot who I is see as a messianic modernist. Who I see as a poet who is as much involved in a kind of imperial civilizing or civilizational mission as he was in a mission of the soul. And, I suggest that there are certain ways in which contemporary messianic thinking, contemporary thinking around fundamentalism might actually not be the same as - no, I never said that T. S. Eliot was a jihadi, but I am suggesting that there are actual elements in this founding text, these founding texts of our education in literature in English and American literature that might actually help us to think about the messianic in our contemporary moment. I then turn to the question of messianic memory in Walter Benjamin; actually I downplay the messianic side and I try to think about memory and temporality and the question of translation in Walter Benjamin particularly in this coupling of barbarism and civilization and the way in which transmission takes place. And I actually have not found that much on the question of transmission although I have spoken to many Benjamin scholars about this. So I have tried to put together some thing about transmission as a form of translation, close to Benjamin. And that in a way helps you to think about the way in which trauma and barbarism finds, each time, what Benjamin calls the "recognition of the now", a different present. And that will be the second move. Then I will talk a little bit about an experience I myself had when I was a subject to this kind of ambivalent, agonistic struggle of barbarism in civilization in relation to cultural heritage. I look at Hannah Arrendt and end with the work of a non nationalist Palestinian artist. Maybe I'm simplifying by saying she's not a nationalist. I don't think she is, but whos very committed to the cause, and yet is a diasporic artist who takes the elements of the kind of a barbaric memory and turns it into I believe something quite pleasant - sorry, something quite prescient and something very important. No, there isn't anything very pleasant today. The pleasant is outside. Inside here there is nothing very pleasant. But, I thank you for being here and, I look forward to your questions. The skies are strafed with flares of messianic messages and false dawns. The air is thick with the fog of war; the dust of collateral damage; the airbrushed abuse of Abuh Grahib, heaped and mangled in their indignity, victims of a technique of terror that the military police interrogation manual calls 'pride and ego down'. After all, we're at war. Endless war. And war is hell in our digital hall of mirrors. The pictures aren't going to go away. These were Susan Sontag's last words. Here they say the war will never end. Elsewhere in the killing fields of Iraq the rules are grab whom you must, do what you want. One U.S. intelligence officer said to Seymour Hirsch, "we're not going to read more people than necessary into our heart of darkness." Joseph Conrad has become an exemplary witness of our times, mentioned again and again in the NY Times and elsewhere and his great novel Heart Of Darkness is in a way a fable of the terror and agony in which we live.

But what kind of time is this? This present of endless terror and trauma at many distances from the event. Traumatism is produced by the future. By the to come, by the threat of the worst to come, rather than by an aggression. These were Jacque Derrida's words on 9/11 not long before he died. And, in the midst of this montage, of traumatic words and times and events, of this un-bearability of endlessness I cannot stop hearing the song of the thrush from Eliot's Burnt Norton, "Go Go said the Bird, humankind cannot bear very much reality, time past, and time future, what might have been and what has been point to one end which is always present." Eliot's Burnt Norton is renowned for its metaphysical and spiritual mediations on the still point of the turning world. The poet awakened by the bird follows the Via Sanctiva of Buddha, St John of the Cross, The Bhaghvad Gita and idealist monism of F.H. Bradley. In his own melancholy comandrin way, Eliot was also profoundly engaged with the turning word itself, a world turned, as he wrote, "inside out by wars." War in Eliot's verse is a metaphor or spiritual and psychic struggle, the inner freedom and the practical desire, as he put it, but in the mid thirties and Burnt Norton was published in 36 Europe was a theater of fascist of and anti-fascist wars. The Spanish Civil War and the Italio-Ethiopian war, the German re- occupation of the Rhineland. If war for Eliot is a metaphor of the messianic struggle of the soul, liberation for the future as well as the past, in his words, then war is also a metaphor for a civilizational struggle to preserve and transmit the hierarchic values of an elite classical culture, committed to the maintenance of a cultural hegemony on a global scale. The aesthetic scale of Eliot's concept of the classic is deeply embedded in the extensive geo- political scale of an imperial culture, be it Rome or Britain. Liberty is good, Eliot writes with sympathy for Machiavelli, but more important is order. Order in this context must be understood as something more than the regulatric force of political power. Order here also signifies the representational authority of a classical civilizational and cultruralist genealogy that struggles to establish the global preeminence of certain Euro-centric cultural ethical and aesthetic values as and I quote Elliot again "An empire and a language with a unique destiny in relation to ourselves." Despite the fact that What Is A Classic was written in 1944 during the darkest nights of European barbarism, Eliot kept faith with that unique destiny and extended it beyond the ourselves of the European Christian domain, amongst which the Jews largely did not count, to assert for its centrality in establishing nothing less than a world order. For we need to remind ourselves, he wrote, that Europe is a whole and, still in its progressive mutilation and disfigurement, that organism out of which any greater world harmony must develop. And I think the period in which he wrote this is and the moment in which he wrote this is as important as what he says. From the Wasteland to the Four Quartets, wartime, I believe, is more than the historical event; or that Eliot isn't preeminently known to be a war poet. I think there is time for a revision of Eliot's estimation as a war poet. It is as if a framing in historical . . . wartime is a framing in historical temporality that provides Eliot with a poetic language of metaphoric translation and transformation. And as is civilizational crusade is translated into the language of fiery spiritual transcendence, 3

we begin to discern at once the important entanglement of the war of nations and the war of souls. It is this entanglement of aims that shapes Eliot 's apocalyptic, messianic tone, which resonates with the spiritual cultural aspirations of some of the fundamentalist, culturally internationalist, spiritually internationalist, religiously internationalist trends of our own times. This is for instance true as, Faisal Devji writes in his excellent book Landscapes of the Jihad, of a Jihadi messianic vision of the future which in those terms is the caliphate? [19:26] As much a metaphysical category as a political vision, the caliphates role allows the jihad to abandon the political geography of the cold war, writes Faisal Devji, made up of national states for a completely de-territorialized space since a caliphate imagined by the jihad possess neither center nor periphery. And, it is no less true of the evangelical messianism that structures uni-laterous preemptive action which is a central tenet of American foreign policy, and can be heard in the prophetic tones of George W Bush's 2nd inaugural address when he asserted that Americas ultimate goal is ending tyranny in the world and suggested that the perfection of an imperfect world should better be left to God. Eliot's poetic ideas and ideals give us an insight into the fervid ascending scale of affective values that can transform a fierce region-ist or nationalist affiliation into a de-territorial metaphysical aspiration to global cultural sovereignty. What starts as the expression in Eliot of a amor patriae, the passionate identification with a cultural territorial location and tradition, love of a country as attachment to our own field of action is followed by a temporal anxiety fueled by sense of the loss civilizational order and historic sovereignty. History may be servitude; history may be freedom, after which come the apocalyptic of holy terror that signifies the realization of divine justice even when it defies the secularist representation of that state of being. The dove descending breaks the air with flame of incandescent terror. The only hope, or else despair, lies in the choice of pyre or pyre to be redeemed from fire by fire. [0:21:46.7] Even more pertinent to the geopolitical problems we face today on a transnational scale are the following lines that explore the complex sublimatry relationship between social anxiety and pious perplexity. When there is distress of nations and perplexity, whether on the shores of Asia or in the Edgeware Road man's curiosity searches past and future and clings to that historic dimension. But to apprehend the point of intersection of the timeless with time is an occupation for the saint. Elliott's messianic mission carried out in the name of holy fire and an incandescent civilizational order, speaks to the messianic conflicts and concepts of our own times. Conrad and Dostoevsky are now continually referred to proximate to our predicament. In terms of the themes and dilemmas that preoccupy both writers there is a useful argument to be made in that direction. But Eliot understands the modernity of the messianic spirit better than either of them. In the space of a few verses, through the efficacy of voice and meter and image, Eliot enables us to inhabit an experience, that temporal rhythm of a messianic history, whether or not we are identified with its ideas or accept its ideologies. Eliot would have himself had little difficulty in embracing the form if not the content of an idea like the caliphate, more a metaphysical category than a political vision the caliphate's role allows the jihad to

abandon the political geography and create a new cultural and spiritual whole. And even though Eliot would have found George W. Bush impossibly low brow and low judge, [0:24:10.8 ] there was a kind of down home Eliot-ism in what has been described frequently as his messianic tone. Having said this, in Four Quartets, we also experience a sudden, surprising shift. There are moments when Eliot lifts his messianic drape, the intolerable shirt of flame, which human power cannot remove in order to reveal the historic human body marked by the instruments of war, traumatized by violence. The trilling wire in the blood sings below the inveterate scars appeasing long forgotten wars. Of what does the blood sing as it flows beneath the inveterate scars? We recall the warbling of the thrush that trills in the human soul Go go go said the bird, human kind cannot bear much reality. But the trilling wire is an instrument of a darker reality. For to trill is not nearly to sing, it is also to twist, to turn, to revolve, to rotate as if the scarred body of taut flesh, like a figure by the artist Francis Bacon, is a tortured and disfigured icon of the turning world. Inveterate scars, long forgotten wars - scars, and wars echoing end rhymes bring back each other to life in the memory of defilement and death ensuring that no violence is lost to memory, no terror forgotten by human history. It is this thread in Eliot's messianic thinking that I want to use now as a transition to my next point. The trilling wire, the inveterate scars are themselves in the practice of appeasement. But appeasement is never a sign of peace, it is at best, a form of pacification. The trilling wire, I believe, are like what Benjamin called small crystals of the total event and create a contemporary constellation of images in which as Benjamin writes of the montage of dialectical imaging in the arcades project, and I quote him, "Every present day is determined by the images that are synchronic with it. Each now is the now of a particular recognizability." The now, of Jean Amery comes to mind. [0:27:32.1] Amery who recounts the ever present image of the tortured body in the concentration camps. I quote from Amery, "torture from Latin torquere, to twist. What visual instruction, he writes, in Etymology,. Whoever was tortured stays tortured. 22 years later I'm still dangling over the ground by dislocated arms, panting and accusing myself. In such an instance there is no repression. Does one repress an unsightly birthmark? The sign that is transplanted in its place is not the skin with which on feels naturally at ease. In this context of these particular nows of the trilling blood in the body, I wanted to recall the now of Satar Jabar, the wire who did figure of Abu Ghraib, whom the Iraqis called a statue of liberty, for the world of the Internet has named Brueghel's Angel of Death after his painting The Triumph of Death. [0:28:53.0] And then, the now, the now of a particular recognizability of a particular history of the 17yr old Tutsi seamstress, Jeanette Ayinkamiye from Nyamata, Rwanda who in summing up her own experience draws a hideous conclusion about the worlds history. I now know, she says, "that a man can become of an incredible wickedness very suddenly. I do not believe the genocides have ended. I do not believe that those who say that we have reached the depths of atrocity for the last time speak the truth. When there has been one genocide in one village there can be another one at any moment in the future in any place in Rwanda, or elsewhere if the cause is still 5

there and we do not know what it is. The now that synchronizes Jean Baptiste, ??Muniancores?? [0:30:09.8] image of an ever present day in Rwanda, once and every day. What happened in Nyamata and the churches, he says In the marshes and the hills are the supernatural doings of ordinary people: a priest, the magistrate, the assistant chief of police, a doctor killed with their own hands. These learned people were calm, and they rolled up their sleeves to get a firm grip on the machete. So for people like me who have taught the humanities their lifelong, criminals such as these are a terrible mystery. What do we make of the suddenness the terrible mystery of this iterative [0:30:56.8] and insistent now that is the moment that Benjamin might describe as a telescoping of the past through the present? What do these testamentary nows bring back and how do they bring it back? What does this now mean when we said instead of those nows, never again. What comes to light in this now of recognizability, Benjamin's phrase, that interrupts and interrogates the long history, the once upon a time of the Rwandan past. We know about the unforgiving tryst of terror and locality that resulted in the brutal hacking of neighbors and friends founded on a complex history of indigenism and racialism that defined the political identities of Hutu and Tutsis for over 50-100 years. Within 6 weeks 5 out out of 6 Tutsis had been killed. We know those histories, Jeanette knows that history, and yet there is something about the return of this presentness, about this moment that returns and recurs, and as she says having provided us with the historical narrative that would explain in historical and sociological, even moral and political terms, what happened, she says, somehow, something returns which seemingly has no cause and no explanation. What comes to mind immediately in Jean Baptiste's description of members of the caring pastoral professions rolling up there sleeves to better grip their machetes, or Jean Amerys equally vivid image of the torturer at Brindon [?? 0:32:49.7] establishing the spirit of his fellow man and then returning to a quiet breakfast in the company of the world as will in representation is Walter Benjamin's observation on the historian's doleful destiny which comes to the fore when he reflects on the provenance of cultural treasures. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism, and just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism also taints the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another. And unconventional as the reading might be, Eliot in 1945 suggesting that despite the disfigurement of the European or Euro- centric, not European, but Euro-centric classical ideal it was in and through that that a new harmonious world order would come is yet another moment when barbarism and civilization make uncomfortable and unhappy bedfellows. In choosing to brush this thought, as he says, against the grain, [0:34:19.0] Benjamin raises for me a question begged by the sudden eruption he would call it a blast a flash and explosion of this now time. A problem posed by images at a stand still, the twisted trilling body of the tortured, the doctors caring hand preparing itself for the machete. The question for me is doesn't this transmission of the barbaric or traumatic past for witness and victim alive, have a debt to the ethics of memory, which is committed and I quote Benjamin "to exploding the homogeneity of the epoch interspersing it with ruins that is with the present." And it is of course in the

midst of these ruins [35:07] that the barbarism is both contained, and it is amongst these ruins that the barbarism haunts. Quite apart from the unconscious repetitions of the traumatic colonel, Benjamin opens up annunciative space for the transmission of barbarism that has a liminal existence somewhere in between the insistence of the unconscious of trauma and the institution of a narrative and historical consciousness. And this interstitial space of articulation or transmission becomes visible in what he calls a figural relationship not between the past and the present, which he sees as being the kind of justificatory narrative of historicist's progress, but between a reconstituted relationship, a relationship reconstituted from the ruins of the present between what has been and the now that I elicited for you from a range of contemporary political barbaric events. [0:36:20.9] Benjamin writes, "Is awakening perhaps the synthesis of dream consciousness as thesis and waking consciousness as antithesis, then the moment of awakening would be the now of recognizability in which things put on their true surrealist face. If the afterlife of barbarism defies repression, and outlives the processes of working through, then how do we account for its now of recognizability, which must provide, in its re-emergence, a sign or signal of the barbaric event, while dissipating the semblance of sameness. What comes back each time is the now what came back in each of those testimonies was not simply the event as it had happened, but the event as it was in the present reconstituting the present itself. My interest in this practice in what I am calling barbaric transmission was immensely sharpened by two perspectives on the afterlife of trauma-- Martin Jay's essay, Walter Benjamin, Remembrance of the First World War, and a short piece by the film maker Claude Lancman titled The Obscenity of Understanding. Jays refusal to let Benjamin's sadness be sublimated into a holistic healing dialectic emphasized Benjamin 's intolerance of cultures affirmative mode, and raised for me, the question of what it would mean for the now of cultural transmission to be re-tooled by the provenance of barbarism not simple the same barbarism, not a resemblance of that barbarism, but a barbarism each time made different but each time repeated as I have said precisely in the place where we thought instead of saying now we would say never or never again. [0:38:38.9] Jay writes, and I quote him, Benjamin refused to seek some sort of new symbolic equilibrium through a process of collective mourning that would successfully work through the grief thus the seemingly paradoxical call in his Dostoevsky essay for an unforgettable immortal life that is none the less without monument without memory. Steadfastly anti-Hegelian he protested against a notion of memory as a remembering of what has been dismembered of the anamanestic totalization of the de-totalized. [...] Steadfastly anti-Hegelian he protested against a notion of memory as a remembering of what has been dismembered of the anamanestic totalization of the de-totalized, scornfully rejecting the ways in which culture, at least in its affirmative mode, can function to cushion the blows of trauma. He wanted to compel his readers, Jay concludes, to face squarely what had happened and confront its deepest sources rather than let the

wounds scar over. [0:41:11.7] If Jay's phrase the wound scar over, echoes Amerys daily discomfort with his scarred skin that is not the skin with which one feels naturally at ease then Lancman telescopes the traumatic barbarism of the past into the now of transmission or mediation. "But I repeat," Lancman says talking of his film Shoah that the real problem is to transmit. Although I think there is no real knowledge before transmission. It is difficult to say it is difficult to explain. It is difficult to understand. I did not try to add new things to the knowledge or the documentation that we now have, but in spite of this what is really important to me, what was at stake was precisely this transmission. Again, you see here what is so interesting: it is not the newness of the knowledge; it is almost as if it is not the proposition of even what happened. When in Rwanda people said we can't describe it after many genocides, you get, you can't describe it, we don't know what happened. It is not as that it is the unconscious in-articulacy of trauma, [0:42:29.6] although that that exists, it is the conscious production of a form of speech, which at one level knows exactly the history, has the cause and explanation, but at another level almost it cannot articulate it. Its almost as if not the proposition but the positionality, the space of enunciation resists making that statement. It's at that level, the level of enunciation. I think this is also actually true in Agamben 's [0:43:08.9] work on witnessing what I at least find most interesting about it, is not what is most often sited or quoted, but the way in which he sees the problem of witnessing as a problem of enunciation not of the enonce, not of the proposition but of the positionality of the subjectin speech at that time. So when Lancman says I didn't add anything people didn't know, its a question of producing a discourse whether it is an expressive phenomenological discourse or an analytic one, which actually stays with that moment of the now and its in-articulacy, which gives it a status not an explanatory status, but an epistemological and also an ethical status. And that's why I gave you that series of now, now, now following on from Eliot's much more delicate evasion of that very kind of moment. Although Lancman identifies Shore's method of remembrance with Freud's concept of working through [44:25], I think there is something else at stake in his insistence that cinematic transition or translation is not new knowledge but a kind of now knowledge of barbarism; not a new knowledge but a kind of now knowledge; not a knowledge that simply reflects or repeats what has happened, but in its inarticulacy in the way in which it creates a cesura [0:44:49.5] in speech, the way in which it actually defies testimony creates another temporality; and its in that temporality in that encrypted temporality which draws you in which you have to actually then encode, that the great stain of barbarism and its transmission is created. Its not by somebody telling you the story of barbarism. It is the way in which the enunciative, the basic most profound enunciated basis of language stops at that time and creates a cesura. And if you read the new introduction to "Beloved" by Tony Morrison, she makes a very similar point. She says I don't want to give you that narrative. I want to throw you in there. I want to throw you in to the cesura?? I want to throw you in to that now of what happened in reconstruction in 124 Bluestone Road. If barbaric transmission rejects the progress and process of culture, as Jay rightly says in its affirmative mode then how does it compel us to confront the scarification of culture. Or do we simply run scared from history's traumas [0:46:04.4] 8

There is in Benjamin theory of the dialectical image, the now of what he calls recognition rather than resemblance; so, not the now that resembles the trauma that gives you the story or the content which resembles the trauma, but creates an entirely new form of recognition of the trauma in the present as it creates as it makes its way in the ruins of articulation or enunciation. Thats what he means that the now of recognition rather than resemblance, the reconstruction in the present in the moment of the present in the discourse of the present. There is a translational thread of expression that is not as apocalyptic as the language of blasting and splitting that he associates with history as a constellation of dangers. And yet, translationality as a way of thinking about the now, is part f what I am calling transmission, is unmistakably inscribed into the vocabulary of awakening and sudden emergence that Benjamin associates with the reconstitution of the moment of trauma, the now. It is in the present, Benjamin writes, and I quote "that historical evidence polarizes into fore and after history, always anew, never in the same way, never simply semblance, or recognition; and it does so at a distance from its own existence in the present instance itself, he continues, like a line which divided according to the Appolonial section, experiences its partition from outside itself." Now with all the scholarly controversy over what Benjamin could have meant by this Appolonian section, there's a long history of scholarship and scholarly disagreement about this, it is safe to say that this internally dividing line of history, which creates the sense of fore and after, both articulates and alienates the relation of the fore and after is crucial to the construction of both what has been the trauma as what has been and the now. To experience or inscribe the internal partition of time and space of event and its afterlife, as if from the outside, to quote Benjamin, is to open up a difference between recognition, the now which is always new and the what has been and the what has been now does not precede the present but is a reconstruction of it after the recognition of the now. Its afterwards. So its in a way the pre what happened before follows on and comes on after the recognition of its repetition or its coming back again. [0:49:05.3] Construction proposes destruction Benjamin writes. And we now begin to see how this dividing line which constructs the fore and after history, is something more than a time line. It is the infusion of a deeply ambivalent cultural value into the passing of time. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism itself. Its because this line creates this dividing line, splits the present, it then creates the possibility of having on either side of it, barbarism and civilization, not in a balance but in a continual translationional move. The now of barbaric translation is only actualized, Benjamin writes, when a part of the past is touched by the present instance; but, there must be no continuity between them. Again his point that there should not simply be resemblance between trauma and what comes after, there has to be a recognition of it. [0:50:13.2] Just, and this part he says is I believe this part of the past this small part of the past that must touch the present, in order for the now to emerge, I believe this is at the heart of transmission; its very close to what Benjamin calls the process of translation. So recognition, recognition for him, the now of recognition, is a moment of translation and as such it is not a working through, it is not a repression, but it is 9

in the ability to recreate through translation and through translation at the level of enunciation the linguistic and discursive and philosophical moment, phenomenological moment of the trauma yet again. [0:51:09.7] The life of memory exceeds the historic event by keeping alive the traces of images and words. Cultural memory, however, is only partially a mirror, cracked and encrusted, that sheds its light on the dark places of the present, waking a witness, here quickening a hidden fact there, bringing you face to face with that anxious and impossible temporality, the recognition of the now. Like a mobius strip , memory does not really transform the appearance of things. It changes, as Benjamin puts it, it displaces the angle of vision. It creates a new relation to the past in which the present and its ability to hold on and change the speed of progressive narrative creates a kind of confrontation with the past. My own experience of such a confrontation went like this: it was an unsettled wet day in late may, the rain skidded across the wind screen blinding us for a moment and then suddenly clearing away, giving us no hint of the kind of day we were to expect. My host, a German professor from Munich, suddenly suggested that we make a stop in Nuremberg, "you must see Nuremberg he said, I must take you there." Where I stuttered? -really meaning why?- and then of course I quickly added "Yes, certainly what a good idea." I vaguely remembered, now quite embarrassed, a film about the Nuremberg trials Witness For The Persecution, seen as a child in Bombay, much before I knew anything about Albert Speer or the millions of Nazis who frequently gathered in what Hitler called the city of the rallies. Just these slight recollections, Hitler's high-pitched and heinous echolalia and a tired phrase from Hannah Arendt, The Banality of Evil, trailed along in my mind as we drove off the autobahn and after some innocuous suburban maneuvering arrived at the Zeppelinfeld, Hitler's massive parade ground. The vast stadium of soaring stone and empty crumbling terraces was almost soundless. Where hundreds of thousands once stood to rapturous roaring attention, today in the rain there was only a few of us: a man scraping the rust of his car, children baiting a dog, a few of us tourists and visitors at a loss for words. And what was far worse, without any sense of how to behave: where to look, what truism of history to utter. Nobody wanted to climb onto the pinnacle of the Zeppelin tribune, to stand at the podium and assume Hitler's viewpoint from which he commanded the attention of his followers. Nobody pointed a camera at anything or anybody, there was no photograph to take home, no family group, no quick shot of the children at play in the field now overgrown with weeds and grasses, it's serried balconies chipped and bruised its colonnades long since demolished. [0:54:35.0] The site was neither background no foreground. It was strangely there and nowhere. How do you dis-posses a heritage site? How do you dis-possess a site or subject of history that is at once a traumatic heritage of its memory. Guilt, reparation, apology, truth and reconciliation, these are important moral dispositions and political strategies that strive to surmount internecine [0:55:10.4] violence and transitional historical moments with the virtue of public confession and collective introspection. But there is nothing in the ethic of ameliorative witnessing committed to fairness that prepares you for that vacuum that now of recognizability that such monuments signify, the half-life of heritage, on

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the other side of which lies the death of culture. If nature hates a vacuum, history is even more repelled by it and that repulsion is also a propulsion. You're drawn giddily into the vacuum and you spin out of it thrown back upon yourself. What does it mean to be in close proximity to the half-life of heritage? As I stood in this place of barbaric transmission, Alexander Kluges remarkable film Brutality in Stone passed before my eyes. Kluge explores the architectural tomb of the half-dead tribune bringing back those voices: Hitler, Himmler, anonymous camp commandments, commandments that he had dug up from the Nazi archive These dispossessed monuments and moments, the half-life of history, are also part of an intangible cultural heritage. Mortar and marbles have their own morals. Theyre intangible in a literal sense. It is difficult to be touched or moved by them, but they are also haunted, haunted by shame and anxiety and humiliation. At first I shrunk away form this site of dispossession noli me tangere. And then I realized that there was no way out of it. The half-life of heritage was mine, and only by embracing both possession and disposition could I construct a new angle of vision, a new site of enunciation. Hannah Arendt and with her concept of the right to have rights, is actually the most significant thinkers in whose work brutality becomes a starting point for conceiving of an ethically sound political community. We became aware of the existence of the right to have rights, she writes, only when millions of people emerged who had lost and could not regain these rights because of the new global situation. There is of course a different between Arendts concept of the global situation and a global polity organized in terms of an equivalence of nation states and a contemporary notion of globalism that we experience. The relevance of Hannah Arendt's argument, for my purposes today in thinking about barbarism ad civilization, lies in her insight into the global as a structure of internally divided contradiction and ambivalence. Arendt has been properly acknowledged for insisting on the importance of the political artifice of the public sphere for defining and defending what is human in human rights, rather than attaching the moral of authority of rights to the abstract nakedness of being human. [0:58:34.4] But what she says for our purposes today, which is most significant is that there is no outside, either ideological political or ethical, to the global system. What ever alienates global inter-dependency or annihilates cosmopolitan values must be seen to be in effect of the internal dialectic a demonic dialectic of the global condition itself. And I quote from her "Deadly danger to any global civilization is no longer likely to come from without," Arendt writes, "the danger is to the global universally interrelated civilization may produce barbarians from its own midst, by forcing millions of people into conditions which despite all appearances, are the conditions of savages." What kind of monstrous birthplace is this, when barbarism emerges from the sack of civility and [0:59:38.9] seeks succor at its own teats. I would like as I end, to bring you to a moment of the recognition, of recognition rather than remembrance, in the work of Emily Yassir, the Palestinian photographer. In her work, there is a very complex relation of moral witnessing, one that seems to resonate with Avishai Margalit's question in his book The Ethics of 11

Memory when he asks, Is the moral witness a forward looking creature, even when his or her testimony is about the past? The beauty of Yassir's work is the way in which she rethinks memory and she rethinks the ethics of memory. Her work with its inter-weaving, its montage of similar photographs, she shows them as pairs, in fact there is a video work, where one shot is taken in Palestine and the other in NY both of the Palestinian community and you can't tell the difference of location. What is really brilliant in this montage that she stages, is the history of memory and the history of trauma she poses suggesting that the place of the ethical witness is somehow caught between a past that refuses to die confronted by a future that will not wait to be born. It is in this kind of temporal disjunction that the moral witness is caught. In a region, then, that lies somewhere between a projective past of memory and a proleptic past of a kind of ethical future, between barbarism ad civilization, the work of the New York based Palestinian artist lives its own half-life of cultural heritage [1:02:01.6] Her work enacts a displacement of the angle of vision that links both diasporic and national histories [...] although committed to a national home for the Palestinians, she choses not to subscribe to the potent communal nits of cultural authenticity that so often drive the exclusionary impulse in any nationalist movement. Yassir's account of her work interposes the space and time of the body as a bridge across these artificial islands, as she calls them, and borders that have been created. The two video installation , Ramala/ NY, juxtaposes scenes of everyday Palestinian life shot in similar locations in Ramala and NY. So careful is Yassir, to place her figures as far as possible in the same position in the frame and to take the shot from virtually the same angle that it is difficult to tell apart the different locations of the various mise en scene? New York or not? Ramala or not? It is almost impossible to answer these questions. Yassir's suggestion is not, I believe, that Ramala and New York are indistinguishable from each other. But what she is doing is very similar to the notion of the now of recognizability that Benjamin suggests. It is not the resemblance that is important. It is not the fact that the two actually resemble each other. What is actually important to understand is how one is split between both sites and what that ambivalent positioning achieves. Yassir's montage of fungible locations and fragile bodies takes a more oblique view of the politics of everyday life. Her purpose in making it almost impossible to visually at the level of resemblance decipher the difference between the two locations, Ramala and New York is to induce an anxious, undecidability in the frame of judgment and representation within the act of viewing. In trying to identify these geo-political locations against the odds, the ruse of the title of the work is to acknowledge the specificity of sight, while eliding visual resemblance. The viewer is split or doubled in trying to go beyond the resemblance to recognizing what is where. And in vacillating between frames, we actually begin to see what she is trying to do. If read from the perspective of displacement the work sets out to relate to two scenario to each other through a diasporic narrative of what she calls going back and forth. It is about passing rough places, about continual border crossings and continual cultural exchanges. In these seemingly settled scenes of quotidian activity, in the complete absorption of both headdresses with their clans hair, for instance, there is an

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unmistakable sense of disorientation rather than location once we realize that we will never know whether we are in Ramala or New York, but in both places. We are dealing with the lives of exiles and refugees of people who feel un-homed or not yet integrated into a national homeland. [1:05:51.5] Yasir's emphasis on ordinary people and everyday scenes represents a complex artistic decision. She acknowledges the influences of On Kawara on her work and nobody who knows the everyday works -he paints every day a painting with the date - nobody who knows that work will doubt that he better than anyone else, understands what a difference a day makes. The date paintings that Kawara has been making for 40 years each work made w/in the single day whose date it shows, just as here there is an attempt to capture that one moment that one gesture that one spot of time that one consolation at one time. We do not know for certain which of Yassirs scenes takes place in Ramala and which in New York. But what we do learn from her montage is that the human measure of time is sustained by the bodies daily wakefulness, its civic activities, its labor, its social relations, played out in both worlds. The inveterate scars of trauma of war still survive in the trilling blood. The clock of corporal reality ticks away with a distinct rhythm and pace back and forth within histories louder tolling of the times of people and the trauma of countries. Yassir's focus on locality in Ramala and New York does not neglect more global issues. There is a foreboding that without knowing exactly where you are at any moment on any day no more than a minute after the video cam has recorded a persons life, and its singular sediments there could be a catastrophe [1:07:42.4] that would forever maim the routine of human beings and families and peoples and cultures and communities. In one of these places, we don't know which, there lurks the epochal memory of 9/11. In another there is the fear of disorder violence, and violation. Yassir, I believe, brings my talk to its end. The photograph a form that Benjamin described as being one that always represented the now of recognizability, the here and now are actually taking you away into a much more infinite space for reflection so that what is important is not in a way the mimetic resemblance, but the recognition as you move between them, of how you take responsibility for both places and both times-- for New York and for Ramala. Our inability to distinguish between locations is in fact in some way the basis of our global ethics. Not necessarily in our continual demand for specificity and specificity and specificity. Its the moving between and carrying for both in different ways that I think is the basis of it. Through this movement we commit ourselves to a double duty to affiliate with the ethic of choosing to become involved with the historic fate in this case of both Ramala and New York. It is therefore in our interest to [1:09:22.8] that we take a double stance. If we must step into the stream of time, to feel the fast flow of progress and at times its cleansing technic contemporaneity, we must also wade knee deep in the sewers of history feeling the tow of the past and its traumas, the tug of the dark and the deep. And in the tension through which we move, hither and thither, there will emerge a current that sustains us, and a

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currency of creative communication that may not save us, but will at least give us some chance to survive. Thank you. [1:10:17]

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