Abstract
What are the political implications of a complex image of time, where time does not unfold progressively in a neat linear structure, but where the past is always present and the future impinges on the now? If the past is inescapably present, how do societies that live with grievously injured pasts come to terms with them in the present for the sake of the future? How do they try to address the collective memories of their people, when such memories are marked by violence and conflict, without resorting to vengeance? Drawing from the philosophical writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, this article examines the way in which two countries have recently attempted to negotiate the politics of memory – Algeria and Rwanda. It poses such questions as how much should be forgotten and how much should be remembered? It also asks the difficult question of how such pasts can be overcome and transfigured in the present for the sake of the politics of an affirmative politics of the future.
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Notes
For Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche's concept of Eternal Return contains within it a vital note of difference. As he writes in Difference and Repetition, for him, ‘the subject of the eternal return is not the same but the different, not the similar but the dissimilar, not the one but the many’ (Deleuze, 1995, 126). For Heidegger, Eternal Return is the return of the same. It re-inscribes being into philosophy, instead of becoming, and betrays Nietzsche's inability to escape Western metaphysics. As one commentator has written, for Heidegger, Eternal Return represents Nietzsche's most ‘telling defeat’ and argues that Heidegger's interpretation of the doctrine might be a consequence of his underplaying of the Dionysian element in Nietzsche's thought, focusing instead on permanence (Gillespie, 1987, 430–431). However, Heidegger's analysis of the creative intervention required at the moment of recurrence highlights a key dimension in the doctrine and supplements Deleuze's affirmative account of Eternal Return, even as they depart from each other in their final assessment.
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Rahman, S. The presence of the past: Negotiating the politics of collective memory. Contemp Polit Theory 9, 59–76 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2008.44
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2008.44