Reconsidering the ethics of cosmopolitan memory: In the name of difference and memories to-come

Abstract

Departing from what Levey and Sznaider (2002) in their seminal work ‘Memory Unbound’ refer to as ‘cosmopolitan memory’ that emerges as one of the fundamental forms ‘collective memories take in the age of globalization’, this article will consider the underlying ethical implications of global memory formation that have yet to be adequately theorized. Since global disseminations of local memory cultures and the implicit canonization of its traumas are intimately related to the concept of archive, I will first focus on what Derrida (1996) in Archive Fever calls ‘archival violence’ and will show its inherent relation to the formation of cosmopolitan memory. Another related concept that I will use and that will problematize the transformation of living, embodied memory into archival, cultural memory upon which the formation of cosmopolitan memory depends is the witness. Using Agamben’s writing (2002) in this context that in Remnants of Auschwitz focuses on the foundational (im)possibilities of bearing witness, I will show that this transformation that determines the very possibility of cosmopolitan memory is far from unproblematic and readily accessible as Levy and Sznaider seem to assume. What will emerge as the most distinctive concern of global memory formation is the ethical material of difference as that which both makes its imperatives historically and politically exigent and that which signifies the difficulties of its unified articulation. Solidarity with the suffering of the other that mobilizes the very formation of cosmopolitan memory is also what should solicit vigilance against the universalistic ritualizations of its prerogatives.

Introduction

Memories always have a reterritorializing function.

— Gill Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus

If humans were to succeed in… making of the proper being-thus not an identity and an individual property but a singularity without identity, a common and absolutely exposed singularity… if [they] could… not be-thus in this or that particular biography, but be only the thus, their singular exteriority and their face, then they would for the first time enter into a community without presuppositions and without subjects, into a communication without the incommunicable.

— Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community

The fact that, today, the memory of national traumas can travel beyond its consigned borders and solicit shame, outrage, pain, tears of sincerity and even spasms of hate on the other side of the world is changing our understanding of historical memory and its relation to subject formation. Used to consolidate national orthodoxies and provide foundational narratives for integration of identities, historical memory, in the age of global challenges, has lost its significance as an articulation of subject legitimacy. As a limit point of our collective experience, ‘an organising memory’ or a ‘central automaton’ ¹ that in Deleuzian terms (1987) determines the cultural and historical legitimacy of our belonging, historical memory has become characterized by open trajectories and deterritorializations that have introduced the possibility of new commonalities, while also attenuating our jealously kept national integrities. The physical wounds that shape the bruised body of a nation never mend but are often reinvested raw in the political imaginary. Through sentimental overcodings and public forms, ceremonials and symbolic rituals, they produce a torsion of a national complex that often gives rise to filiative traumas and lasting transgenerational venom. Different aestheticizations of memory that territorialize suffering and weaponize the wounds have always carried significant weight in the national strategies of self-valorization. Historical memory, in other words, is always closely affiliated with national collective fictions and introverted regimes of identification.

However, as the mediatized landscapes of communication and global information flows reveal an increasing impact on the process of social and political change, historical memory has also become dislodged from its indigenous constituencies and regimes of articulation. Narrow frames of national interest and cultural codes that would limit its significance and affective impact have become globally accessible and subject to ‘mediated worldliness’ in Thompson’s (1995) terms. ² The symbolic relays through which the territorialities of our historical memory are now archived – and, by the same token, displaced – have also emancipated our imaginative horizons, broaching unique pathways for a new cosmopolitanism of ethical responsiveness. The deterritorialization of memory and its affective appeal over and beyond the limits of its immediate significance suggests, in other words, the possibility of an ethics that transcends cultural and historical significations within which memory is articulated. It implies that the most intimate recesses of human history can mobilize humanity against suffering through universalization of interiorized national discretions that can be reinvested beyond the skin of a nation, while providing new frameworks of legitimacy for global solidarity and human rights.

Departing from what Levy and Sznaider (2002), in their seminal work on diasporization of national traumas, refer to as a ‘cosmopolitan memory’ that emerges as one of the ‘distinctive forms… collective memories take in the age of globalization’, ³ this article will consider the underlying ethical implications of global memory formation that have yet to be adequately theorized and can easily be eclipsed by normative social approaches devoted to global concerns. I will argue that Levy and Sznaider, in their overarching strategy to escape the clutches of cultural contingency and develop a form of postmetaphysical solidarity based on universalization of memory cultures, fail to account for the notion of difference that challenges all theoretical assumptions and projections of shared commonalities. Using two ostensibly conflicted but related concepts of the archive and the witness that I consider as structurally significant to the formation of cosmopolitan memory, I will show that the notion of cosmopolitan memory developed by Levy and Sznaider becomes a new recolonizing script or a frame of capture that instead of emancipating difference creates new subject legitimacies that are ultimately based on European traumas and Eurocentric aestheticizations of suffering. The concept of the archive or archivization of historical hurt, of how lived or anamnestic memories are externalized to become cultural mnemoscapes that can be universalized in collective enunciations of solidarities will first show the impossibility of any such enunciations without violence since the process of archivization or hypomnesis is itself hegemonic or determined by territorialities of power and political interest. The concept of the witness, on the other hand, as the originary site of anamnesis, of what should be the ethical foundation for global articulations of shared commonalities in cosmopolitan memory, will show the impossibility of any such articulation without archival violence, since the witness, as I will argue, can only testify to the impossibility of attestation.

In other words, the notion of cosmopolitan memory, as developed by Levy and Sznaider, assumes two impossibilities that have not been accounted for in their attempt to mobilize specific historical memories as a global call against suffering. ⁴ When adequately theorized, both of these structural impossibilities point to the value and significance of difference for all ethical considerations of memory work and, as long as difference remains overlooked, only hegemonic enunciations of shared solidarities that privilege certain memories over others are possible.

Since global disseminations of a memory culture and the implicit canonizations of its traumas are intimately related to the concept of archive, I will first focus on what Derrida (1996) in Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression calls ‘archival violence’ ⁵ and its inherent relation to cosmopolitan memory. For Derrida, ‘every archive… is at once institutive and conservative’ or, in other words, ‘[r]evolutionary and traditional’. ⁶ Archive accommodates and externalizes our memory, safeguarding the continuity of its claims against the increasing opportunism and expediency of political decisions. But it can also fossilize its living sinews in fixed sensory pathways that determine our hereditary traumas and our shared responsiveness. Archive, furthermore, is not a passive beneficiary of our historical hurt but an active agent of its inscription. In a sense, memories only begin as mnemographies or epitaphs, as archives that institute historical determinations of subject legitimacy. This is why Derrida refers to archive as ‘eco-nomic’, which articulates its capacity to preserve, to ‘keep… put in reserve [and] save’, but it does so, as he further explains, ‘in an unnatural fashion, that is to say in making the law (nomos) or in making people respect the law… which is the law of the house (oikos), of the house as place, domicile, family, lineage, or institution’. ⁷ The fact that archive inscribes the limits of legitimacy for oikos – for what could be considered as lawfully belonging to it, to the privilege of protection it grants, and what, on the other hand, is exposed as unprotected outside its thresholds – is significant for the political constitution of global mnemoscapes, in particular, in terms of how legitimate national memories are established or instituted to serve discrete political interests.

Another related concept that determines the possibility of cosmopolitan memory is the witness, as the hinge and limit point where embodied memory, memory whose ghosted remains are carved out of living somatic residue left in the wake of bloodshed, is transformed ‘into cultural, i.e. institutionally shaped and sustained memory, that is, into “cultural mnemotechnique”’. ⁸ The moment of this transformation, however, has not been fully accounted for in global memory formation since it is associated with the event of encoding, I will argue, where somatic memory leaves the body, surpassing the limit of its crippled significations and fractured continents of meaning to be fully articulated as global pyrotechnics of historical suffering, assuming new regimes of meaning in new mnemonic assemblages. The witness could thus be considered as the centre of intensities, where embodied memories pass towards their limit and towards surpassing of their own core significations. The witness, in other words, is a threshold of differential memory relations at which living memory or anamnesis passes into archive or hypomnesis and it is the significance of this transition for the formation of cosmopolitan memory and the ethical implications it entails that will constitute the watershed of my argument.

In order to develop an understanding of the witness as an ambiguous rather than a readily accessible site of mnemographies, its critical relation to cosmopolitan memory will be leveraged through the theoretical armature of Agamben’s writing that focuses on the foundational (im)possibilities of bearing witness. ⁹ Witness, in these terms, will be considered as both the originary site of memory that legitimates its articulation in global archives and the amnestic site of trauma that disables the possibilities of its articulation. This ambivalence of enunciation manifested in the witness that both enables and disables the historicization of memory in its objective forms and ritualized regimes of truth also harbours deeper implications for the organization of memory and the allocations of value that establish its privilege in social and political life.

What will emerge as the most significant concern of global memory formation is the ethical material of difference as that which both makes its imperatives historically and politically exigent and that which signifies the difficulties of its unified articulation. Solidarity with the suffering of the other that mobilizes the formation of cosmopolitan memory is also what solicits vigilance against the universalistic ritualizations of its prerogatives. Not everyone has an open channel with Mnemosyne who, in granting global legitimacy to one’s suffering, also grants power. But, perhaps, what remains unsaid or unremembered in the memory of the other, that which is truly powerless, is also the only thing worth remembering and the only thing that may be impossible to commemorate.

Archi(val) violence

What arguably powers and sustains the formation of cosmopolitan memory, as ‘a memory [that] transcend[s] ethnic and national boundaries’, ¹⁰ is the increasing deterritorialization of local memory cultures. The global interiorization of discrete suffering that the notion of cosmopolitan memory seems to articulate broaches also new analytic possibilities for our understanding of solidarity and universal human rights. The formation of postnational memory cultures, as Levy and Sznaider (2002) suggest, ‘ha[s] the potential to become the cultural foundation for global human rights politics’. ¹¹ Collective appropriations of the Holocaust, they argue, and the irremissible moral injunction its suffering assumes, may provide ‘Europeans with a new sense of “common memory”’ ¹² and pave the way for the constitution of postnational solidarity that liberates historical memory from its atavistic expressions in identity politics. ¹³ Through ‘the decoupling of collective memory and national history’, ¹⁴ new global mnemoscapes can emerge, providing collective narratives that surpass established territorialities of significations and old hurts, while also reinvesting the politics of solidarity with deeper ethical significance. I am no longer the only one suffering injustice, the world is. The world becomes an inexcusable captive of my screams whose hurt is felt resonating beyond the intimacies of familiar identifications to reach global affective grids capable of mobilizing millions. Precariousness of others is no longer theirs alone but cuts across static cultural formations and historically determined thresholds, making unlivable lives and vulnerabilities accessible across a widely heterogeneous terrain. This also opens up the possibility of an ethics that precedes cultural and historical regimes of significations within which memory is usually articulated. The fact that suffering is inexcusable is everyone’s concern and comes now as an effraction of global repose. Diasporization of memory cultures can thus sober up the world to the vulnerabilities we all share, which can also account for its affective impact in the global subject.

Historical memory, however, and the way in which it is canonized in its objective forms is also a monument to territorialities of power. Its objective articulation does not merely register historical stresses but also testifies to overcodings, exclusions and suppressions of hurt. Indeed, considering the Holocaust as the privileged site of memory, Derrida (1996) argues that the claim of ‘uniqueness’, of there being only one, ‘Israel alone’ with the ‘injunction to remember’ ¹⁵ is not in itself without violence. Referring to Yerushalmi’s work on the significance of memory for Judaism, ¹⁶ Derrida ‘trembles’ at the ‘extraordinary attribution’ of ‘absolute privilege [and] the absolute uniqueness in the experience of the promise (the future) and the injunction of memory (the past)’ ¹⁷ to a single people of Israel. Yerushalmi’s claim that ‘“[o]nly in Israel and nowhere else,” in Israel alone, “the injunction to remember [is] felt as a religious imperative to an entire people”’ ¹⁸ harbours more than one arrogative violence. First, the imperative to remember, which is to say, the archival prerogative, is understood as the privilege of a single people of Israel. Second, there is no such thing as a ‘single’ people of Israel, or, if there is, it bears witness to violence of totalization, to suppression of difference and multiplicity. ¹⁹ And, third, which, for Derrida, ‘situates the place of all violences’, is the violence of election or ‘exemplarity’. ²⁰ Archival duty, which constitutes our accountability to the past devolves on us all. However, the burden of memory is discriminative, which is why the gathering of its open signs must be considered in terms of the memory of the other first – both as remembering (of) the other and the other’s remembrance. The archival duty, in other words, must be un-eco-nomic. It must register the memory of those who do not respect the law of the oikos, of the unlawful others who stand outside its thresholds as illegitimate (anomos). It must account for the unaccountable, in other words, just as memory must remember those it has forgotten. ‘Because if it is just to remember’, as Derrida patiently explains, ‘to guard and to gather the archive, it is no less just to remember the others, the other others and the others in oneself, and that the other peoples could say the same thing — in another way’. ²¹ The violence of the archive resides in its inability to account for the unaccountable, for that which does not count and, yet, is that which alone counts.

Furthermore, archival violence does not only emerge from the fact that archived suffering is jealously kept and can become fetishized in the soul of a nation, can mature into weaponized virtue of martyrdom that defines its entire spirit, but from the fact that archives, as inscriptions of historical flows, are institutive. They act as historical frames of capture that conjugate flows, slow down accelerations and reterritorialize historical escape routes. Archives could be seen as origins of striated historical space. ‘Striated space’, in Deleuzian (1987) terminology, ‘always has a logos’ ²² that subordinates flows to points of ingression. It organizes the inherent possibilities of outflows and rhizomatic confluences into gridded narratives and progressions that constrain movement from one point to another. ‘[T]he striated is that which intertwines fixed and variable elements, produces an order and a succession of distinct forms’. ²³ Archival work, seen in these terms, provides frames for encoding, for, what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) refer to as, ‘diabolical powers of organization’ ²⁴ and for allocations of value that establish dominant historical narratives. ²⁵

The institutive power of archives that inaugurate striated historical space is considered by Derrida (1996) in analogous terms of the ‘archontic principle’ that integrates ‘legitimate hermeneutic authority’ and ‘the power of consignation’, implicit in the gathering of archives. ²⁶ ‘Consignation’ is not only the ‘gathering together’ of open historical signs, but it rather ‘aims to coordinate a single corpus, in a system or a synchrony in which all the elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration’. ²⁷ Archives operate by territorializing on open trajectories of historical space. Flight lines that lead to dispersal of historical realities through underground furrows are blocked, multiplicities that produce threshold zones and indiscernibilities are overcoded and subordinated to one dominant code, while any internal ruptures or destratifying lesions of the body or corpus are restored within its core integrities. ‘In an archive’, as Derrida argues, ‘there should not be any absolute dissociation, any heterogeneity or secret which could separate (secernere) or partition, in an absolute manner. The archontic principle of the archive is also a principle of consignation, that is, of gathering together’. ²⁸

The archons or ‘those who command’, ²⁹ the official magistrates in Athens whose prerogatives rest on the authority of public office were responsible for the safety and integrity of what was deposited in the archive. However, as Derrida suggests, they were also privileged with ‘the hermeneutic right and competence’, ³⁰ with the ability to interpret what was deposited and the authority to unify the heterogeneous claims of history into ‘a single corpus’. ³¹ The archive as consignation or as a gathering-together of dominant narratives is never the same as living memory, however, and conflating the two is to commit a violence and close the possibility of alternate futures and the memory of the other that the past always harbours within its shifting frontiers. The critical significance of this possibility that must remain open is perhaps best articulated in Walter Benjamin’s (1999) call ‘to brush history against the grain’, which he proposes in his aphoristic essay ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’. ³² ‘To brush history against the grain’ ³³ is to open it up to alternate or abject mnemoscapes, unsanitary zones and limit points of established memory orders, their underdevelopment that mobilizes ambiguities, ruptures and disjunctive flows that can destabilize the present. Benjamin’s call emerges from a commitment to remember the other, from a responsibility, in other words, to open up the archive to the shadow of its unwritten records, of the unarchived or unaccountable that alone enables the possibility of reimagining the world. This is, in the end, what keeps all archives rescindable and forever open. Memory, considered in these terms, is never past but always yet to come. ³⁴

If our living memory remains consigned to archival assemblages and overcodings then our collective history that rests on its textual remains is irremissibly bound up with the archons’ ‘hermeneutic right and competence’, ³⁵ their discursive or annotative privilege that only reflects the contingency of our social and cultural practice. Living memory or anamnesis, in other words, cannot be integrated within the national imaginary without a degree of mystification. Who is it that possesses the right to archive our past? What part of the past or, rather, whose memory do we remember and privilege in our iterative recollections through cultural forms? The archive, as the watershed of our past that drains its multiple histories to a common outlet, marks also the institutional passage from the private to the public and this passage, which is also the passage from the somatic to the symbolic, is never arbitrary but always determined according to specific privileged topologies that dictate our memory cultures. Derrida’s caveat that the archive is never the arkhē, never the origin, but only the trace, the deferral or displacement of the origin implies that our mnemoscapes are always intimately bound with politics of power and narratives of exclusion. ‘[L]e mal d’archive’ Derrida calls it, ³⁶ or ‘the illness’, in Caputo’s (1997) terms, ‘the disorder, the crisis, the evil (le mal) that besets a culture that depends on archives’, which, as he further explains, for Derrida, ‘is always a function of a disorder in the relations between the arkhē and the archive, a failure to remember, as also a failure to remember the distance between the original and the trace’. ³⁷ While institutive, the archive is also, and by the same token, the

effacement, in truth the eradication, of that which can never be reduced to mnēmē or to anamnēsis, that is, the archive, consignation, the documentary or monumental apparatus as hypomnēma, mnemotechnical supplement or representative, auxiliary or memorandum. Because the archive, if this word or this figure can be stabilized so as to take on a signification, will never be either memory or anamnesis as spontaneous, alive and internal experience. On the contrary: the archive takes place at the place of originary and structural breakdown of the said memory. There is no archive without a place of consignation, without a technique of repetition, and without a certain exteriority. No archive without outside. ³⁸

The archive is thus institutive and abrogative at the same time. It establishes memory orders departing from the witness as the privileged site of anamnesis, or, in analogous Deleuzian terms, by collective assemblages of enunciation that (dis)articulate the material memory flows. What is significant, however, is the fact that the assemblage of the witness or, which amounts to the same thing, the exigency of archivization, the compulsion to remember, to archive, to repeat, can only emerge from the fact that memory itself fails or, in other words, from the depths of forgetfulness that compels us to remember, to archive and to repeat. ‘The archive’, as Derrida suggests, ‘is hypomnesic’, a technical assemblage of historical memory predicated, like all writing, on the destruction of the witness, the living memory or anamnesis:

The archive is hypomnesic… if there is no archive without consignation in an external place which assures the possibility of memorization, of repetition, of reproduction, or of reimpression, then we must also remember that repetition itself, the logic of repetition, indeed the repetition compulsion, remains, according to Freud, indissociable from the death drive. And thus from destruction. Consequence: right on what permits and conditions archivization, we will never find anything other than what exposes to destruction, in truth what menaces with destruction introducing, a priori, forgetfulness and the archiviolithic [archive- or monument-destroying] into the heart of the monument. Into the ‘by heart’ itself. The archive always works, and a priori, against itself. ³⁹

However, the fact that the arkhē and the archive do not coincide, that there is a disjunction, a différance rather, ⁴⁰ between anamnesis and hypomnesis, between living memory as archiviolithic, unarchivic or unaccountable and its iterative accounts in cultural productions of memory, its consignation or its archivic enunciatory assemblage, also implies the constitutive openness of all archives. There is an inherent promise of history to-come in every archive, the possibility of alternate whispers, suppressed sighs and hushed records of experience that remain occluded by the techniques of power but that can cut new trajectories in the assemblages of our present and make way for the true openness of the future that lets the other come. It is a question, in other words, of rhizomatic pasts as limit points of our signifying regimes, the pasts disrupting rather than justifying the established orders of our present by letting the memory of the other come, since ‘the other’, as Derrida (2007) suggests elsewhere, ‘is always another origin of the world’. ⁴¹ There can thus never be only one injunction, one memory alone or one people to keep it, without violence and without arrogation. Keeping watch over absented memories, memories yet to come that can transform our present is also what safeguards the openness of democracy that can only be maintained if our memory accounting is rescindable, if the possibility of destruction of all archives is not foreclosed. This is what lets the other come and is the only thing that can be universalized, not the memory of the other that is always wholly and altogether other and without analogy, but the very possibility of its emergence.

For Levy and Sznaider (2002), however, it is the universalization of the Shoah that becomes the organizing memory, the ‘central automaton’ ⁴² and the ethical horizon of all cultural memories: ‘We suggest that shared memories of the Holocaust… provide the foundations for a new cosmopolitan memory’, a new global narrative and ’a measure for humanist and universalist identifications’ ⁴³ that ‘relates to the need for a moral touchstone in an age of uncertainty and the absence of master ideological narratives’. ⁴⁴ Universalist injunctions that privilege one memory over others, however, risk limiting or constraining cosmopolitanism rather than opening it up to differential futures it is supposed to harbour. In Gerard Delanty’s (2017) cosmopolitan register that focuses on ‘critique’ itself as part of ‘world disclosure’, ⁴⁵ as what enables, in other words, the world to contain more than itself, differential futures represent the ethical challenge to the normative knowledges of the present. Critique, as I understand it in Delanty’s articulation of ‘critical cosmopolitanism’, ⁴⁶ is what pries open the established archives of our memory to disclose its suppressed records, the absented deadends and alleyways that the main drag of history cannot account for and that unblock the passage for the other to come. This ethical challenge of the unaccountable other to the present can only be met by clearing the space for memories to-come that disclose our archives as incomplete and our world as open to imagine otherwise. Cosmopolitanism, in Delanty’s terms, is first of all ‘a condition of openness to the world… entailing self and societal transformation in light of the encounter with the Other’. ⁴⁷ Without this openness, the encounter cannot take place since the other cannot even emerge.

Levy and Sznaider (2002), however, suggest, instead, that the formation of new postnational imaginaries for European memory, where our shared responsiveness should thus liberate the excluded materials of expression, be established on the state-sponsored privilege of one consignation and one injunction alone, which they argue ‘has become a moral certainty that now stretches across national borders and unites Europe and other parts of the world’ that ‘otherwise lack a shared heritage’. ⁴⁸ What should emancipate difference becomes instead a striating memory machine that forecloses the openness for its disclosures, a majoritarian global archive ⁴⁹ that subtends and overcodes the plurality of others and a universal memory cipher through which the memory of others – and, indeed, of all other others who constitute the European consciousness without sharing its guilt – must pass in order to retain the legitimacy of its claims. Is it not rather in the very name of this shared lack of commonalities and in the name of memory cultures to-come, each with its own historical necessity, its own commemorative myths, its own aestheticizations of death and ritualizations of mourning, indeed, each with its own rationality, that any global horizon of memory cultures, any totalizing assemblage of their enunciation or any ‘global collective Memory’, using Levy and Sznaider’s own terms, ⁵⁰ must be called into question?

The memory of the other that is always to-come and that every archive or cosmopolitanized global assemblage has to account for, is, furthermore, archiviolithic and unaccountable, its alterity, in other words, is irreducible to my categories of accounting. ⁵¹ We can see this, if we look in the eyes of the witness: we can see the eyes, but we can never see what they have seen. Our attempt to appropriate the absolute sovereignty of their pain, to articulate and, thus, abolish the depths of our inequalities in order to construct yet another narrative of our own redemption, only manifests the imperialism of our prerogatives to understand, to explain, to justify and excuse. The memory of the other is altogether other, ‘tout autre’, as Derrida (1995, 2005) would argue, ⁵² and, as such, it eludes our aggressive attempts to homogenize its integrities in abstractions or political economies of guilt. There is something in those eyes that trails outside the pragmatics of putting what they have seen to work for political ends. There is something other in the memory of the other that resists overcoding and assimilation in the economy of cosmopolitan memory that Levy and Sznaider (2002) propose and that remains unsayable in the universalistic forms of the European mnemoscapes.

In memory of the witness

Disregarding the fact of archiviolence, of election and monopolization of trauma, for cosmopolitan memory to truly resolve the ethical impasse of its own imperatives, its commitment to commonalities, to global mnemoscapes and collective enunciations would have to be matched by an even greater responsibility to the witness and to the otherness of each one. The witness, whose trauma is often reproduced in iterative cultural practices in order to establish commonalities and weaponize national identities, stands in difference to public aestheticizations of historical suffering. There is a disjunction, in other words, between the living memory of the witness that is carved deep in the skin, like a ridge cracked by a subcutaneous burn, tattoo or cut, and the glorified obsessions of our collective mnemoscapes, speeches and flag-waving expressions of shared pathos that represent our symbolic attempts to interiorize the passions of the witness. Although our different mnemic strategies to cope with and ‘challenge oblivion and death’, as Vosloo (2005) suggests, are important redemptive sources, this distinction, however, may acquire further significance ‘in times when our historical consciousness is threatened [and riveted, I would add] by totalising forces that thrive on abstraction and mythologising’. ⁵³ This obsession, Vosloo continues, is often

accompanied by the strategy of either romanticising or demonising the past. Both these strategies, ironically, serve to enhance a climate of amnesia [where] historical complexity and ambiguity are ignored in favor of simplistic schemes. In the process the past is domesticated and hence loses the ability to speak in a convincing and challenging manner to the present. The past becomes mute. Responsible remembering [instead]… aim[s] at dealing with the past in such a way that the past retains the power to illuminate the present and the future. ⁵⁴

There is thus something mute, unaccounted for, in our collective enunciations of the past. Our subject formation that is contingent for its assemblage on the resources of our memory is also what disables our ability to remember. The relation between our shared memory and the private recesses of the witness that this memory ritualizes in public forms is effractive. The memory of the witness does not rely on advanced memory milieus for its articulation. Indeed, as Gillis (1994) argues in Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity: ‘Only the aristocracy, the church, and the monarchical state had need of institutionalized memory. Outside the elite classes, archives, genealogies, family portraits, and biographies were extremely rare; and there was no vast bureaucracy of memory as there is today’. ⁵⁵ These memory milieus that striate historical space, that require its objectified assemblage in archives and that keep records of our memories are today part of biopower or biopolitical techniques of power used to govern and administer life. Collective or institutionalized memory, to which Gillis (1994) also refers to as ‘elite memory’, ⁵⁶ memory that is global and state-sponsored, on the other hand, is organized and articulated through its memory milieus, because, to use Deleuze and Guattari (1987), ‘one of the fundamental tasks of the State is to striate the space over which it reigns’, ⁵⁷ or, in this case, in terms of biopower, to weaponize the witness in order to forge a stable identity and a common cause. Global memory is highly aestheticized, history is martyred to serve unifying ends and to manufacture imagined communities founded on hurt, on guilt and on suppression of difference. ‘The past’, as Gillis (1994) also suggests, when considering the intimate relation between commemorative public forms and fragile fantasies of national identity, ‘offer[s] a screen on which desires for unity and continuity, that is, identity, could be projected’. ⁵⁸ Collective memory, in other words, is a contested site of inscription, a narrative of what happened rather than what happened and, like any narrative, it is ‘embedded in complex class, gender and power relations that determine what is remembered’ ⁵⁹ and what forgotten, serving particular interests and reflecting partial ends of dominant knowledges. A concerted attempt to articulate and authorize common destines is, by the same token, bound to disavow and unauthorize alternate minoritarian narratives and historical ruptures remembered by others who may be excluded or erased from dominant representations. Formation of global memories belies a contested terrain of differential enunciations, which is also why it is always dependent on ceremonial sites, public forms and immutable statues to objectify and permanentize structural contingencies. These objectified hypomnesic forms that come to constitute the damaged historical soul of communities, however, are semiotic expressions and rhetorical assemblages that striate multiplicities, despotize signs and valorize their meaning. Certain identities and certain memories are privileged and monumentalized in memory sites and burial grounds that can always be desacralized to reveal a plurality of denied or refused pasts which ritualized dedications take great pains to forget. The impassioned debate regarding the desacralization of statues and public entities in the US is a painful but ultimately enabling reminder in this case of living minoritarian hurt that lies disavowed in the cold, sharp surface of ‘stone and metal’, objectifying the racialized fantasies of the white imaginary. ‘These statues’, as Mayor Mitch Landrieu insists in his address regarding the deposition of confederate monuments in New Orleans, ‘are not just stone and metal. They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for’. ⁶⁰ What is ignored is an archive of blood, literally unaccountable and archiviolithic archive within the archive, where the sound of a whip lashing against the black skin still lingers unavowed.

Cosmopolitanization of memory will thus always imply despotic disavowals and reconstructive amnesia rather than remembrance. ⁶¹ The shifting, jagged relief of our mnemoscapes is flattened out and differential production of historical space striated in order to enable identifications and establish legitimacies for imagined communities. But remembrance implies also the possibility of resistance to universal systems of organization. This resistance, in fact, is the very foundation of psychoanalysis. The private intensity of a trauma lodged deep enough in the witness to even carve out a bracket of forgetting within memory itself. A silence that interrupts speech and bears witness only to the impossibility of testimony – which, for Agamben (2002), is finally what characterizes the only true testimony, its inability to testify to anything other but ‘that which does not have language’, ⁶² to the archiviolithic in every testimony. For Agamben (2002), the memory of the witness who cannot bear witness to the memory is what constitutes the testimonial condition. Levy and Sznaider, however, depart from the fact that somatic or lived memory is readily accessible, ‘differentiat[ing] between communicative memory [which is the lived or anamnestic memory], based on group-specific carriers, on the one hand, and cultural memories that can exist independent of its carriers’, on the other. ‘What is at stake’, they continue, in cosmopolitanization of local memory cultures, ‘“is the transformation of communicative, i.e. lived and in witnesses embodied memory, into cultural, i.e. institutionally shaped and sustained memory, that is, into “cultural mnemotechnique”’. ⁶³ The witness, in other words, is not only politically operationalized to serve global ends, separate from the witness or ‘independent of its carriers’, but the memory of the witness is presumed ‘communicative’ or unproblematic in its enunciation of trauma. What is not sufficiently considered here is the fact that trauma is nothing less than a sheer catastrophe of enunciation, it is what is not communicated, a hole beneath the hole of signification:

Trauma may be defined as an original inner catastrophe, as an experience of excess which overwhelms the subject symbolically and/or physically and is not accessible to him. This ‘radical and shocking interruption of the universe, but not its total destruction’ means that the pain experienced by the subject is forcefully relocated into the subconscious. As Geoffrey Hartman puts it: ‘The knowledge of trauma… is composed of two contradictory elements. One is the traumatic event, registered rather than experienced. It seems to have bypassed perception and consciousness, and falls directly into the psyche. The other is a kind of memory of the event, in the form of a perpetual troping of it by the bypassed or severely split (dissociated) psyche.’ This involves the disjunction and the forever belated, incomplete understanding of the event… [which determines] trauma as a crisis of representation, of history and truth, and of narrative time. ⁶⁴

In testimony, the witness is delivered over to bottomless ‘troping’ and metaphoric displacements of that which he bears witness but cannot testify to. To truly testify is to testify to the impossibility of attestation that, instead, is articulated in the fatigue of language, its hesitancies and stutters, its blackouts and incapacities that sabotage communication and disable speech acts. The language of testimony is somatic, affective, particularized and in-significant, making unhomely incursions into anterior regions of enunciation. Faithful testimony signifies only its own failure to bear witness. It indicates that language is divided, every word split along its spine to save the witness from the catastrophe of coming part. In faithful testimony, I must become estranged from the signification in which I am nevertheless called to testify. There must be an abject zone of semiotic material carved out within my own expression, where language escapes the blockage of signification. Language escaping its own limits can be heard in what we consider as disjunctions, inaudible slips, linguistic lesions, graceless accelerations and gratuitous slow-downs. However, these disjunctions that we see as refusals and disavowals, are, in fact, inclusive, mobilizing and connective intensities. They constitute what could be considered as a language of affect, of somatic intrusions or tensors, disengaging a chunk of affective material opening at the limits of language and extending under it, like a buried system of open parentheses that runs alongside every word and that is articulated in every word as its limit. Testimony intensifies language and corners it to its limit. It is where embarrassed words finally shed their discretions in what we would understand only as aphasic registers, assuming unattached forms, butchered syntax, aborted allusions, compensatory strategies and broken exhales. It is only in these interstices of enunciation that faithful testimony can emerge and that affective life can be introduced in signification. Testimonial language approaches what Deleuze (1997) in his essay, ‘He Stuttered’, refers to as the ‘poetic comprehension of language’, ⁶⁵ which seizes hold of its affective terrain. ‘Everyone can talk about his memories, invent stories, state opinions… [b]ut when it is a matter of digging under the stories, cracking open… [representations], and reaching regions without memories, when the self must be destroyed’, as Deleuze (1997) suggests, ‘the means must remain forever inadequate’. ⁶⁶ Bearing witness, in this sense, is akin to what Deleuze sees in Becket, Kafka and Melville. To testify is to emancipate the abject, to let from one’s own language ‘an unknown foreign language escape, so that one can reach the limits of language itself and become something other than a writer, conquering fragmented visions that pass through the words of a poet, the colors of a painter, or the sounds of a musician’. No longer a poet, a painter or a musician, one has become a witness. ⁶⁷ But, in such a testimony, as Deleuze’s caveat further suggests, there will be no ‘well-polished sentence or a perfectly coherent image’, what you will find, instead, is only ‘an embarrassed word [and] a stuttering’. ⁶⁸

There is, thus, something unreadable in every testimony. And it is in memory of this unreadability of the other’s suffering, or, which amounts to the same thing, in memory of and respect for the heterogeneity of every other (tout autre), that cosmopolitan strategies of interiorization must be questioned. Cosmopolitan memory, in other words, does violence to the precariousness of every other, since every other remains without analogy or metaphor.

This aphasic nature of suffering and the impossibility of archiving its formless depths into cosmopolitan images, of ‘transform[ing]… lived and in witnesses embodied memory into… institutionally shaped… “cultural mnemotechnique”’ ⁶⁹ is also what ultimately resists our irrepressible need to commemorate and striate the wounds and still open graves of history. Lives that have been shattered by traumas of history can never be assimilated into rational theodicies and organized systems of signification precisely because they violently interrupt them. There is a radical discontinuity between the affective experience of the witness and its articulation in assumable forms of expression. The embodied understanding of the witness is the limit point of language and what we think of as epistemology, forever exceeding our ability to justify it in global terms. ⁷⁰ Its integrity will always be hiding in the interstices of enunciation that cannot be transcribed by any other means except, perhaps, an ellipsis. The memory of the other resides in the ellipsis, a gaping bracket in our own transcription of it. And you look for it in the places where language breaks down, overpowered by its incapacity to bear witness. You look for it in escaped speech and crude registers, in inadequate means and disassemblages, in what cosmopolitan memory cannot cosmopolitanize.

This is perhaps nowhere more salient than in a deposition given to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission by Notrose Nobomvu Konile on 23 April 1996. Testifying in Xhosa to the circumstances concerning the brutal execution of her son Zabonke Konile by the security forces of the apartheid regime in 1986, ⁷¹ Mrs Konile’s deposition was considered illegible in the striating procedures of Western rationality that governs the genre of attestation and was not accounted for in the final record. Her testimony, haunted by affective fractures of loss, indigenous epistemologies and intrusive forays of the imaginary, was seen as inadmissible for the conciliatory objectives of the final report. As the subsequent inquiry into her testimony states, Mrs Konile, who would not forgive the police officers pleading for amnesty, was not mentioned in the index of the Commission’s report, she was ‘unmentioned, incorrectly ID-ed, misspelt, incoherently testifying, translated and carelessly transcribed’. ⁷² The journalist, Antjie Krog and the established scholars of Xosa and psychology and gender studies, Nosisi Mpolweni and Kopano Ratele, appointed by The University of the Western Cape to examine and reconsider Mrs Konile’s testimony, were all struck by its resistant registers of ‘incoheren[ce]’, ‘incomprehension’ and ‘a third category that [they] called “cultural untransferables”’, ⁷³ an entire continent of meaning that could not be articulated in global accents of cosmopolitan dictionaries. As Krog, Mpolveni and Ratele (2009) suggest, ‘[t]alking about Mrs Konile as if her rootedness in Xhosa culture were irrelevant would be unhelpful when trying to understand her. The entangled African identity of Mrs Konile is not the same as the entangled identity of a woman living in Sweden. They are, quite simply, not similar, globalized, rootless individuals’. ⁷⁴ Mrs Konile’s narrative, however, is not illegible but is rather made illegible by the global registers of testimony that it questions and that foreclose the possibility for her disclosure. If, in Delanty’s (2017) terms, it is ‘the encounter with the other’ ⁷⁵ that entails reflexive transformations of normative knowledges then the inclusion of the other’s memory that requires unblocking the space for its disclosure is the first performative concern of critical cosmopolitanism. Mrs Konile’s narrative, in its very unaccountability, carries an ethico-political injunction of an alternate future, which calls into question the mnemoeconomies of the present that cannot accommodate the alterity of its demands. The archiviolithic, that which is in-significant and cannot be accounted for, in other words, is precisely that which is most significant, insofar as it carries transformative possibilities that call the present to account. ⁷⁶

The disjunctive registers and narrative seizures of Mrs Konile’s testimony are related specifically to her accounts of a man ‘Peza’ abruptly violating the coherence of her narrative and a sudden appearance of ‘a goat’ whose (in)significance seems to reveal intensities and unwanted lesions her testimony cannot account for, the archiviolithic contents of expression that testify only to the incapacity of her testimony to bear witness. ⁷⁷ Clusters of unavowed attachments, entangled cultural archives and subaltern knowledges that stalk Mrs Konile’s traumatized language are also the fatigued registers of ‘embarrassed words’ and ‘stutters’, in Deleuzian terms, ⁷⁸ of affective incursions that rivet her testimony to what ‘we’ can only see as pathologies, superstitions or other illegitimacies, ultimately inadmissible as the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. ⁷⁹

Ironically, however, as Agamben (2002) suggests, this is where language is at its most revealing, where it advances into the territory of complete attestation. Agamben associates testimonial language with Primo Levi’s account of Celan’s poetry whose ‘inarticulate babble, something like a non-language or a dark and maimed language’ ⁸⁰ is intimately related to his experiences at Auschwitz and the clawed, persecuted semiotic of those who ‘touched bottom’, ‘the complete witnesses’, ‘the drowned’, who, in Levi’s terms, ‘have not returned to tell about it or have returned mute’. ⁸¹ This is where language passes towards its limit, forming affective clusters and subterranean universes of reference in which it finally testifies but only to the impossibility of attestation. ‘[T]estimony’, Agamben writes,

is the disjunction between two impossibilities of bearing witness; it means that language, in order to bear witness, must give way to a non-language in order to show the impossibility of bearing witness. The language of testimony is a language that no longer signifies and that, in not signifying, advances into what is without language, to the point of taking on a different insignificance — that of the complete witness, that of he who by definition cannot bear witness. ⁸²

The default of language to appropriate and externalize the memory of the other in discursive systems of meaning is what finally makes it testify. The point at which language breaks down in fatigue is the point at which it turns into testimony. Bearing witness to its own undoing, it also registers the collapse of that darkness it testifies to on itself. Indeed, it is only when the witness can no longer bear witness, when testimony only compounds the guilt of having testified – yet another mal d’archive – that they bear witness, because the testimony is always to something that trails unsaid behind it as a resistance to attestation, the archiviolithic or the zone of indiscernibility between the signifier and the signified, between the arkhē and the archive. This bearing witness of language to its own incapacity to bear witness, when it registers its own limit, is the proper moment of testimony, the moment when language, having used up its powers of detachment, finally testifies, like a mute apostrophe, to the untestifiable. The memory of the other is thus the limit point of language, the moment when language assumes an altogether different responsibility. This is why, for Agamben, the only way to bear witness to suffering is to look for the moment in which language comes apart and cannot bear witness to anything other but the impossibility of testimony.

It is this aspect of bearing witness, presumed as unproblematic in the formation of cosmopolitan memory, that, in fact, opens up something like a new ethical terrain that begins when language betrays its limit in the face of experience deeply felt and lived through. The terrain, that, however, is not outside language but is rather a threshold of indifference between the arkhē and the archive into which language can advance at its breaking point. In order for ethics to begin, language needs to be overpowered by sincerity in which the other counts more than myself. To use Levinas, in slightly different but analogous terms, the other’s memory is always first, is my first concern, just like the vulnerability of the other precedes my own fear of death. ⁸³ The cosmopolitan pledge consists thus in preparing the way for this sincerity to emerge and the world to disclose itself by dismantling the blockages of the present and the dominant regimes of signification in order to let the memory of the other come.

The notion of cosmopolitan memory, for Levy and Sznaider (2002), is a consequence of modernity and it develops rather through ‘a common patterning’ of ‘globalization processes’ ⁸⁴ that legitimize ‘a belief in, and… willingness to act on universal values’. ⁸⁵ However, it also emerges through the political aestheticization of suffering and homogenization of difference that implies yet another abrogation of responsibility for the memory of the other. Universal values also seem to assume explicitly Western forms of suffering as representative, since it is the Holocaust, ‘in its “universalized” and “Americanized” form’, as the authors explicitly state, ‘that provides Europeans with a new sense of “common memory”’. ⁸⁶ Postnational solidarity that founds its prerogatives on the wounds of European history, however, is not postnational but imperialistic. It privileges the narrative of its own horrors and recolonizes the world with the site of its own trauma through which all suffering then must pass to qualify as legitimate, the Bangladeshi genocide in 1971, the Burundian genocides of 1972 and 1993, the East Timorese genocide from 1974-99, the Cambodian genocide from 1975-79, the Guatemalan genocide from 1981-83, the Kurdish genocide from 1986-89, the Isaaq genocide in Somalia that occurred between 1988 and 1989, the Rwandan genocide of 1994, the Yazidi, Shia and Christian genocides in Iraq, Syria and Libya that are still taking place. Transformative ethics calls for a different accounting of our memories, one where the forgotten is always remembered first. This is how we keep the space open for memories to-come.

Conclusion

What has thus emerged as one of the critical concerns for the formation of cosmopolitan memory is the consideration of alterity or what could be seen as the double genitive of the memory of the other, where both the other and the other’s memory are always my first concern. This keeps all archives forever open and rescindable, while also maintaining a space for the ad-venture of memory, for histories yet to come that can transform our present and enable alternate futures. The archive that is structurally significant in the formation of global mnemoscapes is not only shown to be hegemonic and territorialized in its consignation or gathering-together of embodied memories or anamnesis, but it also fails to account for the archiviolithic and unaccountable content of trauma that disables common registers of testimony and haunts the witness as the originary site of anamnesis. The transition from the witness to the archive, the very process of hypomnestic assemblage upon which collective enunciations of cosmopolitan memory against suffering rest, also themselves produce suffering since violence and erasure are inherent to their modes and registers of remembering.

This aporia, however, does not, in the least, reduce the ethical significance of cosmopolitan memory but, on the contrary, increases its exigence and could be seen as productive if developed and rearticulated within Delanty’s (2017) cosmopolitan register that he has identified as ‘critical cosmopolitanism’. ⁸⁷ In Delanty’s terms, this distinctive approach does not only provide ‘a critique of other conceptions of cosmopolitanism’ ⁸⁸ but also ‘seeks to identify transformational possibilities within the present’. ⁸⁹ As suggested, the normative commitment of cosmopolitan memory to look for our shared commonalities would have to depart from an even greater responsibility for difference and for the otherness of each one. For critical cosmopolitanism, ‘world disclosure’ ⁹⁰ seems to depart from the same irremissible concern for alterity, where our ‘social world in terms of its immanent possibilities for [transcendence and] self-transformation… can be realized only by taking the cosmopolitan perspective of Other as well as global principles of justice’. ⁹¹ It is only within this new terrain of ‘immanent transcendence’ ⁹² that cosmopolitan memory can find its place. A terrain that is difficult, no doubt, that requires vigilance and patience, but one that all cosmopolitan imaginaries must traverse in order to avoid violence.