Making History: Representation and ‘Forgetting to Forget’

Abstract

This paper attempts to delink a politics of emancipation from a narrative of hope. It does so through examining the strong link between our persistent desire for a progressive notion of history, and the peculiar kind of memory at work in our practice of historical consciousness, that I call here ‘forgetting’ to forget. Following from a reading of Freud, Marx and Hegel, I suggest that the past which issues from progressive ‘historical consciousness’ is not the origin of that memory, but rather its illusory effect. Using Jacques Derrida's notion of the ‘revenant’ I argue that the ghost in the ‘machine’ of historical consciousness is none other than the progressive notion of history we inhabit, in which we can no longer believe, but whose loss we cannot fully metabolize.