Memory and Forgetting in Hamlet, Beloved, and ... - Wiley Online Library

Two Ghosts and an Angel: Memory and Forgetting in Hamlet, Beloved, and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Ross Poole I. Haunting Memories [W]hen a memory reappears in consciousness, it produces in us the effect of a ghost whose mysterious apparition must be explained by special causes. Henri Bergson1

We rely on our memory to bring to our attention aspects of the past which are relevant to the present. To some extent, this role is cognitive: our memory provides us with information gleaned from the past which we need in order to pursue our current projects. But its role is also, to use an old fashioned term, conative: our memory guides our will in the directions required by the responsibilities and commitments that we have acquired in the past. If I make a commitment to do something, then I need to be able to recall at the appropriate time that I have made this commitment, that others have certain expectations of me, and so on. As Nietzsche emphasized, it is not sufficient that I recall that I did promise; I must also recognize that I now have a responsibility to honor it.2 My past promise is not something which I may keep or evade as it suits my current projects; it remains as a demand which I must meet, independently of and prior to my current projects. I must have a “memory of the will” if I am to have the “right to make promises.”3 Both aspects of memory stand in need of explanation. It is an astonishing achievement that in our everyday life the right bits of information come to our attention more or less as we need them. Of course, things often go wrong: there is something we need to remember, but we cannot bring it to mind. It is as if, to recall one of Plato’s models, the data of memory are like birds in an aviary – in our possession but not under our control.4 Sometimes we cannot catch the bird we need. But these failures should not make us forget how often memory does its job. It is not just that the birds come to hand on call; it is rather that they come without our having to call them, more or less precisely when they are needed. Conative memory, “memory of the will,” is even more puzzling. How can I now know that a future me will remember, not just that I have made a promise, but that I am bound by it? How do I know that my future self will not treat it as a past contingency rather than a current commitment? Unless I do know these things, I do not have the right to make promises. Promises are only one of the many ways in which we bind the future and are bound by the past. It is, as we shall see, not possible to engage in ongoing relations of any emotional depth without taking on future responsibilities. Memory is the medium (though much more than a medium) through which these responsibilities are transmitted from the past to the future. When we do not keep a commitment because of a failure of memory, this is often a moral failure: we ought to have remembered, but did not. This is puzzling: memory is not, in any obvious sense, under our control. Indeed, in familiar cases, the memory breaks into Constellations Volume 16, No 1, 2009. C The Author. Journal compilation C Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

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our consciousness: we suddenly realize what the time is and what we should be doing. But if the operations of memory were as contingent, even random, as they often seem, it is hard to explain why we should be held responsible, not just by others but also by ourselves, for failures of memory. In order to understand the ascription of responsibility, we must assume that memory is, in some basic sense, an act of the self, and that there is an implicit agency lurking within the apparently contingent and random nature of memory recall. That I forget is, at least sometimes, an act which can be ascribed to me, and it is for that reason I can be held responsible for my forgetting.5 In most cases of forgetting, memory failure is not complete: we are aware that there is something we have to do, but cannot bring to mind what it is. When we are reminded, perhaps inadvertently or indirectly, the memory springs to life. It is as if we knew all along, but the knowledge was not available to us. This background presence of the memory manifests itself as an uncertainty of the will. We are uncomfortably aware there is something we ought to do, a commitment that we have made, but do not know what it is. This feeling of discomfort also accompanies the experience of déjà vu. We sense that a situation is familiar, that we have experienced it before, but we cannot recall where or when. There is a cognitive aspect to this: we know (or feel) that there is a similarity between the present experience (especially of place) and some previous experience; but we are unable to identify the nature of the similarity or to bring to mind the previous experience. This in itself should not be disturbing: there are undoubtedly many similarities between past and present which we cannot bring to mind at any given time. What makes the experience of déjà vu unsettling is that we feel that the unresolved sense of similarity is a symptom of something of importance. There is something we ought to respond to, or perhaps even to do, and we do not know what it is. Déjà vu, like an unremembered promise, brings with it a hint of failure, even of moral failure: we suspect that we are called upon to respond but are unable to do so. The experience of déjà vu merges into that of the uncanny. In both cases, we find ourselves in a situation which is redolent with meaning, but we do not know what the meaning is. However, in the case of déjà vu, we ascribe the mystery to our mode of experience; in the case of the uncanny, we experience it as a feature of the situation itself. We sense a level of reality which is concealed, though only partly concealed, by the world as we experience it. This carries with it a sense of danger: that what is concealed is horrifying and a threat. But it is not the danger which explains the disturbing aspect of the uncanny. If it were, we would be more disturbed by an actual danger than the mere likelihood of one. But this is not the case: very often, we respond to actual danger without disturbance, even a sense of relief. What is disturbing is the uncertainty.6 In part this is cognitive: we do not know what is hidden. But it is also, and more fundamentally, conative: our will is paralyzed. We do not know what we ought to know; we cannot act as we ought to act. The uncanny brings with it a sense of moral failure. We feel that if we fail to respond as we ought, we will place, not merely our physical being, but our moral being at risk. Here, as in more everyday cases of forgetfulness, our sense of responsibility point to a hidden agency. There is a secret intentionality in our failure to know and to act. Even as we ascribe the uncanny to the world around us, we are also aware that the truths which, if they could only be revealed, would allow us to fulfill our responsibilities must, in some sense, be available to us. What the uncanny reveals is something about us: our responsibility is to know what is concealed and to act upon it. The German word for ‘uncanny’ is unheimlich, unhomely: we find ourselves in a familiar, everyday environment, but because of what is hidden, it is not heimlich, i.e. we are not ‘at home’ in it. Freud, in a fascinating analysis, argues that the word heimlich has two quite distinct and even opposed associations: “on the one hand it means what is familiar and C

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agreeable, and on the other what is concealed and kept out of sight.”7 This is not simple ambiguity: it is rather that the “familiar and agreeable” turns out to involve “what is concealed and kept out of sight” so that the Heimliche “develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, the Unheimliche.”8 The mysterious and threatening is an aspect of the comfortable and everyday. The home, the arena of family life, turns out to be, not a refuge from the uncanny, but an exemplary case of it. The taken for granted world in which we are – literally – “at home” is also a world of hidden tensions, of desires which cannot be spoken, and of expectations and demands which can only exist on the condition they be concealed. It is a world of multiple and contradictory meanings. To be “at home” is to be subject to many realities and responsibilities, each of which is partially concealed by the other; it is to be unsettled and disturbed by these concealments; it is to experience the uncanny. If German usage perceptively relates the Unheimliche to the Heimliche, it is also misleading. It suggests that family life is not just an exemplary case of the uncanny, but the source of all other forms. Freud, of course, was more than happy to run with this suggestion. For him, every instance of the uncanny derives from the revival of repressed infantile desires, or – a rather awkward category – of culturally primitive desires and beliefs, usually of animistic kind. The second category ultimately reduces to the first: what is culturally primitive corresponds to the infantile stage in world history.9 There is no reason to go down this path. Freud’s insight is that our experience of the uncanny is derived, not merely from an ambiguity in the world, but in what we bring to bear on that ambiguity. If there is a potential threat, we recognize it is a threat directed to us; if there is uncertainty, it is an uncertainty as to how we must respond to the situation. There is a sense of responsibility; we feel we ought to respond, but do not know how to. It may be that at some fundamental level, what we bring to bear on these situations has its source in the dramas of early childhood. But as we shall see, there are many aspects of our experience of the uncanny which are not reducible to infantile needs, and which need to be explained in social, political, and historical terms as well.10 It is a relatively small step from the uncanny to the ghost. If the uncanny is an experience of hidden meaning and uncertainty, the appearance of the ghost provides one way (of course not the only way) in which the meaning becomes manifest and the uncertainty can be resolved. The ghost emerges from the past. It is the shadow, the spirit, or – in one case we will consider – the flesh and blood embodiment of someone who is dead. The ghost is always conceived as an objectively real existence (otherwise it would hardly count as a ghost), but it does not have the same significance for everyone. In many cases, the ghost speaks; in every case, it has a message. It comes to reveal what was done in the past, and what must be done in the present to resolve what was done in the past. The message is not for everyone. There is a specific person (or more than one: I ignore this complication for the time being) who has the responsibility to receive the knowledge and to respond to the demand. However, the designated recipient is ready. Neither message nor demand comes as a surprise. The message expresses in concrete and specific terms (though sometimes not concrete and specific enough) what the recipient already knows. When the ghost of Hamlet’s father tells him that he was murdered, and by his brother, the present king, Hamlet’s response – ‘Oh, my prophetic soul! My uncle!’ (I, v, 48) – indicates how much this possibility had been engaging his thoughts. And the ghost’s command that Hamlet ‘Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder’ (I, v, 31) will hardly have been unexpected by one who already suspects ‘foul deeds’ (I, ii, 279). Let me suggest a hypothesis. Ghosts appear to tell us, at least those of us for whom their message is intended, what we already know. They do not bring news, nor alert us to responsibilities which we did not know about. Their role is to remind us of what we know and of what we have to do. They are like someone who reminds us of a promise that we C


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have made (indeed, in some cases they appear to do precisely that).11 They appear on the scene to tell us of a responsibility that we have. This is not, at least not usually, a case of being informed of something which, amnesiac like, we have completely forgotten, the traces of which have been completely erased. We know, but we do not want to know. As I noted above, the everyday case of remembering manifests a secret intentionality: we remember the commitments we have made when we need to, because we need to.12 When we forget, there is often a further intentionality: we want to put the memory aside. Ghosts may be understood in terms of this double intentionality. The ghost is the embodiment of the will to remember. It is a reminder, perhaps a rebuke. It is the past come to life to tell us that if the dead remain dead, the responsibilities they left remain. It breaks into our consciousness, as if from the outside, because we need to be told; but what it tells us, we already know. There are two corollaries to this hypothesis. One is that ghosts may not tell the truth. They only know what we know. But what we know may be incomplete, partial, or simply wrong. In revealing what is otherwise concealed, the ghosts may say what needs to be said – though we will have to consider the possibility that certain things are better left concealed. But this does not give them an overriding epistemological privilege. Nor do they represent the only moral voice which needs to be heard. Ghosts represent the past, and only the past. But not all moral demands come from the past. Sometimes, the responsibilities of the present and the future must take precedence over those to the past. Ghosts must be given a hearing, but it may be that we must sometimes disobey their orders.

II. The Prince of Denmark Heaven and earth, Must I remember? (I, ii, 146–7)

Let me provide an account of a brief period in the history of Denmark. It begins with the rule of warrior King Hamlet, and his victory over King Fortinbras of Norway, a victory in which Hamlet personally killed Fortinbras in combat. As a consequence, King Hamlet extended his rule to include most of what was Norway, leaving a portion for the defeated royal family under the rule of Fortinbras’ brother. However, there were intrigues in the court of Denmark, and King Hamlet died in somewhat mysterious circumstances. He was succeeded by his brother, Claudius, despite the existence of another claimant, the son of the previous king, Prince Hamlet. The son of Fortinbras, Young Fortinbras, who has vowed to avenge his father’s defeat, seized the opportunity to raise an army against Denmark. King Claudius commenced negotiations to neutralize the threat of Young Fortinbras. However, distracted by the continuing uncertainties in his court, he was easily satisfied by Young Fortinbras’ promise not to move against him. Astonishingly, he even acceded to Fortinbras’ request to march his army through Denmark in order to make war on the Poles. This decision proved crucial. By the time Fortinbras had concluded his campaign against Poland, the intrigues at the court of Elsinore had worked themselves out in such a way that both the King and the main claimant to the throne were dead, along with a number of other nobles. In this state of confusion, Fortinbras was able to step in and assert control. Denmark now became a part of the Kingdom of Greater Norway under the rule of the new King Fortinbras. Most of Hamlet is concerned with the younger Hamlet and his fantastical, wayward attempts to avenge his murdered father. But Hamlet’s story is paralleled by a more directed and effective project, that of Young Fortinbras, both to avenge his father’s death and fulfill his projects. Although Fortinbras himself only appears on stage twice, he is present in the C



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text right from the beginning. The sentinels who first sight the ghost of the older Hamlet on the walls of Elsinore Castle are on guard because of Fortinbras’ threat. Horatio, struck by the appearance of the ghost in the armor King Hamlet wore in battle against the older Fortinbras, recalls at some length the struggle between the two kings. When King Claudius appears on stage for the first time, it is to announce his plans to deal with Fortinbras, characteristically not by force of arms but diplomacy. Later, when his ambassadors return, he responds to their hopeful scenario with what must be uncharacteristic naivety. His favorable response to Fortinbras’ request to march his army though Denmark allows Fortinbras to make the first of his two brief appearances on stage. In a fascinating scene (IV, iv), Hamlet and Fortinbras, the two vengeful sons, pass by each other, though they do not meet. 13 Hamlet, en route to England with his traitorous friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, crosses paths with Fortinbras and his army, marching to do battle with the Poles. The fact that so many men are to risk their lives for what is described as a worthless bit of land leads Hamlet to one of his most revealing soliloquies. It does not occur to him that here, as he has found so often elsewhere, appearances are likely to be deceptive, and that Fortinbras may have more ambitious goals in mind. Fortinbras and his army are successful in their encounter with the Poles; but more importantly they are near at hand in the final moments of the play. Hamlet, mortally wounded by Laertes’ poisoned rapier, lives long enough to anoint Fortinbras as the new king; and Fortinbras marches on stage to take control of proceedings: I have some rights of memory in this kingdom, Which now to claim my vantage doth invite me. (V, ii, 432–3)

Although almost all the characters in Hamlet are subject to the demands of memory, it is only Young Fortinbras who is able to meet those demands and claim the “rights of memory.” Almost all interpretations of Hamlet ignore or marginalize the political story that I have emphasized. This is not altogether surprising. A good deal of the fascination that Hamlet has for us derives from the very characteristics which render him unsuitable to play a political role – his hesitations, uncertainties, antic humor, and self-parody. While he also evinces talents for deception, callousness, and unsentimental cruelty which are worthy of a Renaissance prince, he has none of the singleness of purpose necessary for the pursuit and exercise of power. He is peculiarly, if anachronistically modern.14 He is able to distance himself, not merely from the web of deceptions within which he must make his way, but from his own responses and emotions, and to use this distance to put himself into words. He is obsessively concerned with sex, especially the sexual life of his mother, and with death, especially his own. It is this Hamlet, the modern subject before his time, who has attracted the attention of Goethe and Hegel, Freud and Lacan, and thousands of lesser figures. But if we are to understand this modern Hamlet, we must not lose sight of his untimeliness. Hamlet’s enormously articulate self-concern arises through an evasion or denial of his political responsibilities. To ignore the political context within which Hamlet’s fate is worked out is to read Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. The first thing to notice about the ghost in Hamlet is that it is not merely Hamlet’s ghost. It is unusual, perhaps unique, amongst the ghosts who appear in Shakespeare’s plays, in that it is a public existence, and not a private experience.15 The ghost of Hamlet appears to Barnardo and Marcellus, the two sentinels, to Horatio, Hamlet’s friend, as well as to Hamlet himself.16 The significance of this is overlooked by some of the greatest commentators. Hegel, for example, discusses Hamlet in the context of an argument about the role of the supernatural C


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in literature.17 In great literature, he argues, “freedom and independence of decision are . . . reserved for man,”18 and he dismisses those works – he has “Christian materials” in mind – in which “all kinds of fantastic beings like witches, specters, ghostly apparitions, and more of the like” are allowed to make independent and unpredictable interventions in human affairs. When an author introduces supernatural elements, for example gods in Greek tragedies, this is to provide to the protagonist an external embodiment of what is already “immanent in him as his spirit and character.” Shakespeare is cited as providing “the finest examples” of this in the modern era: . . .The appearance of the ghost in Hamlet is treated as just an objective form of Hamlet’s inner presentiment. With his dim feeling that something dreadful must have happened, we see Hamlet come on the scene; now his father’s ghost appears to him and reveals the whole crime.19

But the ghost does not appear only to Hamlet. It also appears to the sentinels and to Horatio; indeed, the only reason that Hamlet is on the battlements to meet the ghost is that he has been brought there by Horatio for this purpose. So the ghost is not just “an objective form of Hamlet’s inner presentiment.” It is also an “objective form” of the presentiments of those others to whom it appears. If we assume that that they are not untypical subjects of the state, then we must suppose that the message that the ghost brings is of concern, not merely to his son, but also to his subjects. It is, at least in part, a political message. This much is clear to Horatio. In his first address to the apparition, he asks by what right it assumes “that fair and warlike form in which the majesty of buried Denmark did sometime march” (I, i, 55 – 57). As he explains to Barnardo and Marcellus, Such was the very armor he had on When he the ambitious Norway combated. (I, i, 71 – 72)

The ghost, the shade of the dead father, has chosen to appear not merely as the king, but as the warrior king, representing his domain in the field of battle. This prompts Horatio to remind the others of the ongoing struggle against the equally ambitious son of the “ambitious Norway.” When the ghost returns on the following night, Horatio draws an explicit parallel between this visitation and the supernatural events which took place in Rome “a little ere the mightiest Julius fell” (I, I, 125 – 6), a parallel which suggests that the assassination of a political leader is not far from his mind.20 While he is unsure of the specific meaning of the visitation, or perhaps too wary to do more than hint at it, he is prepared to voice his suspicions in general terms: But in the gross and scope of my opinion This bodes some strange eruption of our state. (I, i, 78 – 80)

Marcellus goes further: Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. (I, iv, 100)

It is unlikely that Marcellus and Horatio were using the term ‘state’ in what was to become its modern sense to refer to an apparatus of government, conceived in an abstract, impersonal sense. Though the term was in the sixteenth century beginning to take on this idea, it was

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still associated with a much more personalized conception of political power, in which the state was not merely the possession, but the personal attribute, of a king.21 When the king fought “the ambitious Norway” he did so in the name of Denmark (recall Horatio’s reference to “the majesty of buried Denmark”). That the ghost appears in the very armor worn by the king on that occasion suggests that he represents the king in his official capacity. Whatever the specific message that the ghost has to communicate, his appearance as the dead King cannot but bear on the legitimacy of the present state of Denmark. If the ghost represents a past which makes a claim on the present, the past he represents is that of the state. The demands he makes are not merely the concern of one individual, but of all the subjects of that state. Of course, the message the ghost has is for Hamlet, and though he indicates that he would have spoken to the others, it is to Hamlet that he unburdens his story as soon as he has the opportunity. Hamlet is his son and the claimant to the throne, and is the appropriate person to put right the affairs of the state. The ghost has much to say. Some of it is complaint. He is condemned to punishment until his “foul crimes . . . are burnt and purged away” (I, v, 17 – 18). Because he died unexpectedly, he was not able to purge himself of his sins.22 The sexual betrayal by his queen with a lesser man (lust will “prey on garbage,” I, v. 64) is a further torment. But the central message is clear: If thou didst ever thy dear father love – Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder. (I, v, 29 & 31)

There is little doubt what is expected of Hamlet. He should organize the latent opposition to the king, making use of his position as next in line to the throne (as Claudius makes clear, see I, ii, 113), the prestige of his father, and his popularity amongst the people (of which the suspicious Claudius was well aware; see IV, iii, 4; and IV, vii, 20). When the moment is ripe, he should assassinate Claudius and assume the throne. Indeed, this scenario was foreshadowed in Julius Caesar, which Shakespeare had written shortly before Hamlet. But Hamlet was only able to follow the first lines in this scenario. He insists, with the ghost’s famous below stage support, that Marcellus and Horatio swear silence about all that had occurred. But if this foreshadows a conspiracy, Hamlet makes no further moves in this direction. He retreats into himself. Why is it that Hamlet, despite his vow “to sweep to my revenge” (I, v, 37), endlessly delays actually doing anything? Clearly, there is something in Goethe’s suggestion that “a heavy deed [has been] placed on a soul which is not adequate to cope with it”; that the obligation is impossible to fulfill, “not the impossible in any absolute sense, but the impossible for him.”23 But this is only part of the story. Hamlet is perfectly capable of deceit, callousness, cruelty and murder. But what he is not able to do is envisage the crime in anything but personal terms. It is his father who was killed, not Royal Denmark; Claudius’ hasty marriage to his brother’s wife is a personal betrayal of a son by a mother, not a symbolic assertion of political continuity and monarchical right. Hamlet’s moves against Claudius are conducted with no thought to the political consequences – how Denmark is to be ruled, the threat of Fortinbras met, and so on. Hamlet’s problem, I will suggest, lies in his refusal of the political. Insofar as he recasts the demand of the past in purely personal terms, he makes them impossible to satisfy. I have already mentioned the scene in which Hamlet watches Fortinbras’ army pass by on its way to do battle in Poland. Hamlet is struck by the apparent worthlessness of the object of the war: C


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I see The imminent death of twenty thousand men That, for a fantasy and trick of fame, Go to their graves like beds . . . (IV, iv, 62 – 65)

It is probable that Hamlet does not understand the real motives behind Fortinbras’ actions. However, there is a deeper lack of comprehension. For Hamlet, the demands of honor which drive Fortinbras require that one be prepared to expose “what is mortal and unsure . . . even for an eggshell” (IV, iv, 54 – 56), i.e. to risk one’s life for what is of no importance. Hamlet contrasts this readiness to “find quarrel in a straw” with his own failure to revenge the enormous crime of “a father killed, a mother stained” (IV, iv, 59, 60); and he endeavors to use this discrepancy to spur his “dull revenge” (IV, iv, 35). Hamlet is intrigued by the concept of honor; indeed, he recognizes that it is the readiness to put one’s life on the line for a matter of principle which makes of man something more than a beast. But there is a deep incomprehension. For Hamlet, the objects of honor are essentially trivial, a mere “eggshell,” or “fantasy and trick of fame.” But the objects pursued by Fortinbras are of immense symbolic importance. The capture of a part of Poland will demonstrate that Fortinbras is a worthy successor to his warrior father. Here, as always, honor is concerned with appearance. But this is not a matter of personal vanity; it is a public demonstration that one is worthy of a certain place in society. In Hamlet’s world, honor is a condition of participation in political life.24 If Hamlet were to assume his place in that world, he would recognize that his object, the death of Claudius, is not just a matter of personal revenge, but of political honor. As such, it must be carried out in the appropriate manner, by the right person, and lead to the restoration of the throne of Denmark to its rightful occupant. Hamlet’s speech is of someone who is outside the perspective of honor. He admires it, and even desires to emulate it; but he does not understand it. 25 It is significant that the ghost should have warned Hamlet against too great a concern with his mother: . . . nor let thy soul contrive Against thy mother aught. Leave her to heaven . . . (I, v, 92 – 93)

The warning is justified for a number of reasons. There is no evidence that Gertrude was aware of, still less involved in the murder of King Hamlet. Her faults are those of weakness, not of agency. More significantly, she is a woman, and a prize or a symbol, not an active participant in political life. Hamlet’s revenge should be directed toward Claudius, not Gertrude. But Hamlet’s conception of the crime is not the death and displacement of a king, but the betrayal of a husband and a son. In this crime, Gertrude is at least an equal partner. The past which torments Hamlet before he meets the ghost concerns his mother’s sexual betrayal of his father so soon after his death (I, ii, 156 – 7). When he moves towards the fateful meeting in Gertrude’s bedchamber, he ponders how he should act: O heart, lose not thy nature; let not ever The soul of Nero enter this firm bosom. Let me be cruel, not unnatural, I will speak daggers, but use none. (III, ii, 429 – 432)

These are the words of a man for whom the murder of his mother is a possibility. In the bedroom, his behavior is so violent to rouse in Gertrude the fear that he will murder her, and

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it is her alarm that leads directly to Polonius’ death. But the fact that he has just killed a man hardly interrupts the flow of Hamlet’s invective against his mother’s betrayal. Indeed, it is to bring this to an end that the ghost intervenes for the final time. He appears to remind Hamlet of his responsibilities: This visitation Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose. (III, iv, 126–127)

But it is also to remind Hamlet of the Queen’s feminine weakness: O, step between her and her fighting soul. Conceit in weakest bodies strongest works. (III, iv, 129 – 130)

On this, his final appearance, the ghost is only visible to Hamlet. Gertrude sees only “vacancy,” the “incorporal air,” and assumes that Hamlet’s behavior is a further symptom of his disordered mind. He appears, not in armor, but in night attire.26 The ghost is no longer the warrior king, Royal Denmark, clad in the symbols of strength and authority, but a betrayed and vulnerable husband, trying to deal with a rebellious and disobedient son. This appearance of the ghost is now, as it was not before, “just an objective form of Hamlet’s inner presentiment;” and a political story has been reduced to a domestic drama. For Freud, Hamlet is disabled in his pursuit of vengeance because he recognizes that Claudius has put into effect his own desires to kill his father and sleep with his mother.27 There is something in this reading: Hamlet’s concern with the sexual life of his mother and his demand that she cease to have sexual relations with Claudius, strongly suggest that his own sexual desires are in play. But Freud shows no awareness of the political context within which Hamlet constructs his domestic drama. The ghost who appeared on the ramparts of Elsinore was Royal Denmark, a King whose throne had been usurped and whose Queen had been appropriated; his message was directed towards the appropriate claimant of the throne, his son, the Prince of Denmark. However, Hamlet refuses to understand the political meaning of the message. When the ghost reappears in Act III, its status has been reduced. Hamlet is no longer the Prince, but a jealous and disturbed son; the ghost is not the King but an aggrieved husband and petulant father. This shift in focus carries with it a fundamental problem for the project of vengeance. If the crime to be resolved was an act of treason against the state, the ghost’s demand of his son was difficult, but reasonably clear-cut. Hamlet’s task was to kill the king and to claim the throne. If successful (and why not?), honor would have been satisfied and the legitimate political order restored. There would have been unfinished business. The new King Hamlet would have continued to mourn his dead father and to distrust his mother (no doubt he would have imposed a long period of penitence – perhaps in a nunnery). But the main issues would have been resolved; the rights of memory successfully claimed. Hamlet had a different understanding of the crime: it was one of personal betrayal – especially by his mother. To this crime, there could be no appropriate resolution. To kill his uncle was possible, but hardly satisfying. To wreak vengeance on his mother – and as we have seen, Hamlet was certainly tempted in this direction (see III, ii. 425 – 32) – would impose an intolerable moral burden, one greater than the crime it was intended to address. And vengeance would not address the deeper problem. The crime was not so much a disruption of a previous order as its invalidation. It revealed the life of the family and the court as a façade where devotion and loyalty concealed treachery and betrayal. For Young Fortinbras, it was clear what the rights of memory were: the restoration of the legitimate order; the fulfillment of his father’s goals. By transforming the political into the C


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personal, Hamlet had made the demands of the past impossible to fulfill.28 Hamlet was now hopelessly trapped in the past. His almost accidental death amidst the random chaos which brings the play to an end is the only appropriate conclusion.

III. Unclaimed Memories I have a survivalist intention to forget certain things. Toni Morrison29

It is the 1870s.30 The house at 124 Bluestone Road on the outskirts of Cincinnati is occupied by Sethe, a black woman who, some eighteen years before, had escaped from slavery in Kentucky. Living with her is her daughter, Denver, and a recent arrival, Paul D, an old friend from the slave days in Kentucky and now Sethe’s lover. Until a short time ago, the house had another occupant: the ghost of Sethe’s other daughter who had been murdered very shortly after Sethe’s arrival. The ghost had made its presence felt by tricks which were both childish and cruel: strange lights, physically disrupting the house, smashing mirrors, spilling milk, and attacking and maiming the family dog. Sethe’s two sons, Howard and Buglar, had left home many years before. Her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, had died some years earlier. No one has any doubt that the cause of the haunting was the dead child, though there is some divergence as to what the baby was trying to express. Despite its apparent venom, spite, and rage, Sethe tells Paul D. that the presence in the house is “not evil, just sad” (8); Denver has a slightly different story: the ghost is not sad, but “Rebuked. Lonely and rebuked” (13). Paul D does not yet know the terrible truth, that it was Sethe who murdered her own child. He knows enough, however, of Sethe’s past to know how much it bears on her, and he sees the ghost as a further burden. When he succeeds in bringing the haunting to an end, he does so with the cry: “She got enough without you. She got enough!” (18). Shortly after the expulsion of the ghost, a young woman appears in the front yard of the house. She is physically ill and exhausted, and incapable of sustained speech. ‘What might your name be?’ asked Paul D. ‘Beloved,’ she said, and her voice was so low and rough that each one looked at the other two. They heard the voice first – later the name (53).

Beloved is never able, or perhaps willing, to give an account of where she came from and how she arrived at 124 Bluestone Road. One possible story is that she is an emotionally disturbed young woman who has spent many years locked in a room and sexually abused by a white man. For a while, Sethe believes something like this (see 119). It is also the suggestion of Stamp Paid, an observer of and sometime participant in the events at Bluestone Road, when he hears about her from Paul D (235). Another story, which becomes the dominant one, is that Beloved is Sethe’s daughter, returned to life. Initially, it is Denver who believes this: that Beloved is her lost sister, who will dispel the loneliness of her life. But Sethe comes to believe it too: that Beloved is her miraculous chance to undo something of the horrors of her past. If Paul D remains skeptical, he does not deny the possibility (see the conversation with Denver, 266–7). Later in the novel, most of the women in the neighborhood also accept that Beloved is Sethe’s daughter, come back to exact vengeance on the mother who killed her. However, when Sethe is allowed her own words (210 – 17), there are fragments of other C



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stories: of baskets of flowers, a sea passage (perhaps the “Middle Passage,” the horrifying journey on a slave ship to America), of heaps of dead men cast into the water, and of a lost mother. There is a strong suggestion that Beloved’s consciousness reaches back to a more distant past. But it is the second story which provides the organizing narrative. For Denver, for Sethe, and eventually for the women of the neighborhood, Beloved comes to be the physical embodiment of Sethe’s murdered child. The anger that had been expressed in the haunting of the house at Bluestone Road – “Who would have thought that a little old child could harbor so much rage?” (5) – is now more focused. It is directed at destroying the few relationships which Sethe has been able to sustain – her job, with Paul D, and eventually with Denver. Beloved’s final goal is to destroy Sethe herself. Her fury is not hard to understand. It was after all Sethe, her own mother, who killed her. So too is her neediness. She has in the body of a young woman the insatiable demands of the child she still is. As with any child, Beloved’s desires are infinite; but unlike other children, she does not have a mother capable of saying no. As Sethe comes to identify Beloved with her lost child, she also becomes increasingly incapable of resistance to her demands: She sat on the chair licking her lips like a chastised child while Beloved ate up her life, took it, swelled with it, grew taller on it. And the older woman yielded it up without a murmur (250).

Denver had welcomed Beloved; indeed, her initial fear had been that Beloved would leave again. But she found herself excluded from the relationship between Sethe and Beloved, and from that perspective, began to understand its destructive dynamic. She saw that Beloved “was making her [Sethe] pay,” and that “there would never be an end to that” (251). It was part of the legacy of slavery, that every transaction had a price attached to it. But if Beloved was demanding a payment for her own murder, for the betrayal of a child by its mother, the demand went beyond the possibility of fulfillment. There could never be an equivalent. What Denver also came to recognize was that Sethe’s submission to Beloved was not merely a matter of guilt. Sethe was also seeking to make Beloved understand why she had done what she had done. She wanted above all for Beloved to realize . . . what it meant – what it took to drag the teeth of that saw under the little chin; to feel the baby blood pump like oil in her hands; to hold her face so that her head would stay on; to squeeze her so that she could absorb, still, the death spasms that shot through that adored body, plump and sweet with life . . . (251).

For Beloved to understand what it meant for a mother – her mother – to do this, she had to realize that there was something “worse than that – far worse” than death: That anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad that you couldn’t like yourself any more. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn’t think it up (251).

But there was no way that Beloved could come to that understanding. Sethe had herself realized this early on, when Beloved’s presence was only that of a destructive haunting: she was “too little to understand” (4). But Sethe forgets this insight, as she spends her best energies in “trying to persuade Beloved, the one and only person she felt she had to convince, that what she had done was right because it came from true love” (251). And Beloved sat, C


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looking at her, “[u]ncomprehending everything except that Sethe was the woman who took her face away, leaving her crouching in a dark, dark place, forgetting to smile” (252). Though Beloved had the body of a young woman, and indeed was pregnant to Paul D, she remained a child. There was no place in her emotional life for an understanding of what Sethe had been trying to save her from, even when she killed her. All she could do is absorb into herself her mother’s life in a desperate and futile attempt to replace the life she had lost. Her awareness of the destructive impossibility of the relationship between Sethe and Beloved leads Denver to break out of the enclosed household of Bluestone Road, and to seek help in the wider community. But the community has to respond. It has to recognize that Beloved is not merely Sethe’s private ghost, nor a haunting specific to Bluestone Road. Initially, their response is charity. By leaving food for the now starving family, Sethe’s neighbors begin to restore the communal bonds that had been shattered by the killing of her child. Sethe’s neighbors also recognize their own complicity in the events leading up to the killing of Beloved. When the four horsemen – “school teacher, one nephew, one slave catcher, and a sheriff” (148) – came to reclaim the escaped property, they had been silent, sullenly watching: “nobody ran on ahead. . .nobody sent a fleet-footed son to cut ‘cross a field soon as they saw the four horses in town hitched for watering while the riders asked questions” (157). They had not alerted Sethe and Baby Suggs to the danger. The party that Baby Suggs had organized a few days before to welcome Sethe and the new baby, to celebrate the new life that freedom had made possible, and even to quiet for a moment the memories of the deaths and horrors of the past, had become “too much, they thought” (137). There was a sense of envy of the largesse and resentment of the good fortune of those responsible. Though it was Sethe who had killed her child; the responsibility was not hers alone. Those who might have intervened but did not had to recognize that they too were involved. Other memories surfaced. Ella, previously a friend of Sethe’s who is to play a significant part in the ultimate rescue, recalled the beatings and rapes that were part of her own slave history: “Her puberty was spent in a house where she was shared by father and son whom she called ‘the lowest yet’. . .” (257; see also 119). And Ella too had been responsible for the death of her child. She had delivered but would not nurse, a hairy white thing, fathered by “the lowest yet”. It lived five days without making a sound. The idea of that pup coming back to whip her too, set her jaw working, and then Ella hollered (259).

Beloved was only one of many ghosts waiting to drain the life out of those who had survived slavery. All who had shared the experience of slavery had memories which if let loose were capable of destroying them. “Past errors” could not be allowed to take “possession of the present” (256). So if the community could reach out to Sethe and reintegrate her, this meant the expulsion of Beloved. In the confused melée of misunderstanding which brings Beloved’s story to an end, Sethe’s crazed attempt to kill, not her daughter, but the white man she imagines to be there to enslave her (or to take Beloved away, it is not clear), is prevented by her being – literally – submerged in the community. Beloved is left alone, looking at “the man without skin. . . looking at her” (262). She runs away. Apart from a report by a little boy of “a naked woman with fish for hair,” she is not seen again. Beloved was too much for Sethe, too much for the community. She embodies a past which cannot be integrated into the present and the future. So she must be cast out, even from memory. In the last pages of the novel, Morrison writes:

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Everybody knew what she was called, but nobody anywhere knew her name. Disremembered and unaccounted for, she cannot be lost because no one is looking for her, and even if they were, how can they call her if they don’t know her name? (274)

What does it mean to say that “nobody anywhere knew her name?” When the young woman first turns up at Bluestone Road and Paul D asks her name, she replied “Beloved.” Is that not her name? In one sense, it clearly is: it functions as a name for most of the novel. But in another and more important sense, it is not a name. Denver almost recognizes this. At one point, she recalls that she recognized that Beloved was her sister, “soon as she spelled her name – not her given name, but the one Ma’am paid the stone-cutter for” (208). But this raises the question: What was Beloved’s “given name?” If Sethe’s other children – Buglar, Howard, and Denver – were all given names, why not Beloved? If she was given a name, it is not used, even by Sethe. It has been forgotten. In that sense, “nobody anywhere knows her name.” She is called “Beloved” because that is the inscription on her tombstone. She might have been called “Dearly Beloved” if Sethe had provided twenty minutes of sex to the engraver (5; see also 203). “Beloved” was all that ten minutes bought. But if this explains why Sethe and Denver call her “Beloved,” it does not explain why this is what she calls herself. It may be that when she offers “Beloved” in response to Paul D’s request for her name, she has another story in mind. Hints of this story emerge later. When Denver asks “‘Why do you call yourself Beloved?’” she responds “‘In the dark, my name is Beloved”’ (75). When the story allows Beloved her own words, she recalls a time when “[g]hosts without skin stuck their fingers in her and said beloved in the dark and bitch in the light” (241). When she seeks out Paul D, she demands: “You have to touch me. On the inside part. And you have to call me my name.”

When Paul D attempts to resist, she insists: “Call me my name.” “No.” “Please call it. I’ll go if you call it” (117).

But all Paul D can say is: “Beloved.” And Beloved does not go. Perhaps because the name she seeks is not “Beloved,” but something else, a given name which is hers, a name which she probably does not even know. And this is the name which is denied her. “Beloved” is a word on a tombstone: a commemoration of a murdered two year old girl, a girl murdered by her mother, who paid for the engraving with ten minutes of sex. Or it is an epithet, used to express a fleeting emotion aroused by brutal desire, but repudiated in the light of day. It is not a name. Consider for a moment the role of names in commemorative practices. We are now accustomed to the way in which war memorials and the like have a place for a seemingly endless list of the names of those who died. This kind of memorialization seems to have been a product of the twentieth century, beginning with the First World War. What was new, however, was not the practice of naming, but the aspiration to name everyone who died. It is one of the more bizarre aspects of recent history that the unparalleled mass slaughter of its wars and conflicts has been associated with the desire to commemorate every individual slaughtered. In previous years, it had been deemed sufficient to record the names of the great and famous. To be “of name” was to have a place in memory to

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which others – “without a name” – were not entitled. Now, everyone – or as we shall see, almost everyone – has that entitlement.31 Even now, sixty years after the events, the Israeli Museum Yad Vashem (literally: a place and a name) is undertaking the task of listing all of the six million Jews who lost their lives in the Holocaust (a task now more than half complete). Underlying this bureaucratic zeal is not just the principle that those who died have the right to a place in memory, not merely as members of a group, but as individuals, but the belief that it is the individual’s name which is the appropriate, indeed necessary way to do this. It is the name which provides a direct link to the person named. When we use a name, or even read or hear it, we make contact, for a moment, with the specific individual named. We do not have to rely on the vagaries of personal experience or the uncertainties of historical knowledge. To read the name, even one amongst thousands or millions, brings to mind the person who made a sacrifice or suffered a wrong, even without any other specific knowledge of that person. Without the name, the person sinks into the mass anonymity of a large-scale historical process. Even in the case of those who figure in our own lives, the name provides a necessary focus for the memory of the person. Sethe recognizes this when she says to Stamp Paid, the man who transported her and Denver to freedom: “I wish I knew your name so I could remember you right” (91).32 The use of the name does not, as Avishai Margalit suggests, somehow bring the past individual into the present; commemoration is not a low-rent immortality. It is rather that the name brings the present into contact with the past; the use of the name allows us, for a moment, to recognize the specific suffering, contribution, life or death of the named individual.33 But if Beloved has a name, nobody knows what it is. The name she should have had as Sethe’s daughter has been forgotten; as if it had been obliterated by the violence of her death. The sexually abused young woman may once have had a name, but no one – not even Beloved herself – knows what it is. All that is retained is a term which, in other contexts would be affirmation of emotional commitment, is here a signifier of sexual debasement. And insofar as the name collects together fragments of a more distant past – perhaps of folk memories of Africa, slave ships, and murder – “Beloved” is not the name of an individual, but stands for the millions of individuals whose names will never figure on a memorial plaque.34 Beloved becomes a figure, like that of the Unknown Soldier, able to represent many, just because she lacks a name of her own. Perhaps that is why Beloved must come back in a desperate attempt, not merely to seek repayment for what she has lost, but to claim a place for herself in memory. But this is the place she cannot have. As those who know her forget or die, the nameless Beloved will slip through the cracks of memory. And if this is not how it should be, it is as it must be. Beloved represents a quite unrecoverable loss. As Sethe discovered, there was nothing she could do to satisfy Beloved’s demands. For Sethe to take Beloved into her life means the endless sacrifice of the present to the past. This means death. Denver recognizes when she takes the action which leads to the expulsion of Beloved. Paul D realizes it too; to live means to have a future: “Sethe,” he says, “me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow” (273).

Nor can the horror and pain which Beloved represents become part of the emotional life of the community. As the tough minded Ella recognized, the present generation does not merely have responsibilities to the past; it also has responsibilities to the future, and also – not insignificantly – to itself:

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The future was sunset; the past something to leave behind. And if it didn’t stay behind, well, you might have to stomp it out (256).

What Beloved represents is a past of insurmountable horror. There are many such horrors: shattered families, dead children, ruined lives, so many ghosts, waiting for the right moment to remind the community of its past suffering. But how can the community respond to this? To attempt to meet the demands of the past is an impossible project: nothing by way of revenge, compensation of even empowerment, would begin to make up for the horrors of the past. To allow the past into the present is to risk being overwhelmed by it.35 Perhaps no one has a better claim than Beloved and the millions like her to be “re-membered”; that is to be integrated into the community’s collective memory and to receive the recognition, love and nurture they were denied in life. But this claim cannot be met. Beloved and the other Beloveds must be “dis-remembered”; that is, expelled from the community and forced to recede into the past.36 Morrison ends the story of Beloved by saying – several times – that “It was not a story to pass on” (274–5). As W.J.T. Mitchell points out, this is ambiguous.37 In the most obvious, if paradoxical sense, it means that Beloved’s story cannot or should not be told. In another sense, it means that the story is not one to “pass”; that it is unavoidable. In the first sense, it means that Beloved and those she represents will not have the place they deserve in the stories the community tells of itself. But, and this is the second sense, they will inevitably make their presence felt in those stories. They exist on the margins of memory: so many ghosts demanding recognition and love, justice and revenge. Most of them have no name or their names are irretrievably lost. There is no way that the present generation can bring to mind any but a tiny few of the untold millions of individuals whose lives were ruined by slavery. For the victims of slavery there can be no parallel to the Yad Vashem project of recovering the names of those who perished in the Holocaust. What remains are the ghosts which will continue to haunt the lives of later generations.

IV. The Island of Children [C]hildren have no past, and that is the whole secret of the magical innocence of their smiles. Milan Kundera38

There is little doubt that Hamlet and the state of Denmark would have been better off if the ghost had never appeared on the battlements of Elsinore. So too would Sethe and those around her if Beloved had not set foot in 124 Bluestone Road. Once the past was revived, neither Hamlet not Sethe was able to respond to its demands. Hamlet does not survive. The burden of his past was too great. Sethe, an altogether stronger character, does survive. Indeed, the novel ends on a strangely hopeful note. Sethe, the bad mother, finds in Paul D a good mother who will nurture her into some semblance of health. But it can only be a semblance. Sethe will always carry the wounds of the past with her; as with Hamlet, release will come only with death. Hamlet and Sethe suffer from an extreme form of an illness that affects us all. We are all subject to the past: we feel guilt and remorse, responsibility for past mistakes, regret for lost opportunities, and so on. But it is not altogether clear why we should be so troubled by C


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the past. It is obvious enough that we should learn from the past: we should bear in mind the truths about the world established by others and the mistakes we ourselves have made in order better to deal with the challenges of the present and future. One important function of memory is to provide us with this information. But why should we allow memory to make further demands on us? Since there is nothing we can do to change the past, why should it remain in our consciousness as a burden we cannot escape? Why should we allow the past an emotional presence in our lives? Why should we respond to its demands? Freud registers this problem in “Mourning and Melancholia.” His account of the normal experience of mourning is that the individual is reluctant to face the loss of a loved object (person or ideal). Ultimately “respect for reality” wins the day, and the agent – at least the normal agent – gradually learns to do without the loved object and to withdraw his or her psychological investment from it. But even for the normal person, this process is protracted and difficult. The work of mourning can only be carried out “bit by bit.” Freud comments in passing: Why this compromise by which the command of reality is carried out piecemeal should be so extraordinarily painful is not at all easy to understand in terms of economics. It is remarkable that this painful unpleasure is taken as a matter of course by us.39

The question Freud raises here is a profound one. It is indeed “remarkable” that the pleasure seeking ego insists on retaining its attachment to the lost object, rather than simply finding another. Why does the lost object retain its presence for the ego? Unfortunately, Freud does not pursue this question. He is not so much concerned with the “normal” phenomenon of mourning as with its pathological variant, melancholia, and this is the subject of the rest of his essay. But implicit in the question he has raised is the possibility of a more radical therapy than anything Freud envisaged. Why not treat the presence of the past in our memory as analogous to the presence of ghosts in the world, a residue of more primitive modes of thought, which an enlightened consciousness would learn to do without? Mourning, like melancholia, would become a pathology, unknown to the healthy and clear minded. And along with mourning, would go guilt, remorse, regret, and all the other emotions which carry the past into the present.40 The possibility of this more radical therapy is raised in Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Two of the episodes in this novel (Four and Six) concern a young Czech woman called Tamina, living in exile in an unnamed country in Western Europe. Tamina, like Hamlet and Sethe, suffers from memory. Her husband, with whom she was very much in love, died shortly after they fled from post 1968 Czechoslovakia. He was cremated and, rather than carry his ashes around with her in her solitary life of exile, she has scattered his ashes. The only object of his that she retains is his passport (116). Everything else of their life together had been left with her embittered and uncooperative mother-in-law in Bohemia. While there are no legal or political barriers to her return, she feels that to do so would be to betray the memory of her husband, just as, she thought, their circle of friends and colleagues who had remained in Prague had betrayed his memory (132–3). There had been no public rituals surrounding his death, no memorial stone, nor recognition of his existence amongst Tamina’s circle of acquaintances. For Tamina, it is as if the only trace of the existence of her husband is in her memories of him and of their life together. But these memories are fading; there were large gaps that she cannot fill in, even details of his appearance of which she is no longer sure. Each of the periods of their twelve years together was marked by a nickname that her husband bestowed on her. But she can no longer recall any but a few of these, “all

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the others are soaring outside time, free and mad like birds escaped from an aviary” (119). She is aware that there is no way that she will recuperate the details that are already lost, nor those that will be lost in the future. To keep those memories alive is a duty to her dead husband: Because now that he was dead, her husband had no one but her, no one but her in the entire world! (122)

But Tamina was also aware that the work of memory was necessary for her own precarious identity. The death of her husband had left her with no plans for the future; the only point to her present life was to recover all that she could of the past she had shared with her husband: For Tamina is adrift on a raft and looking back, looking only back. Her entire being contains only what she sees there, far behind her. . .if the tottering structure of her memories collapses like a clumsily pitched tent, all that Tamina will be left with is the present, that invisible point, that nothingness moving slowly towards death (119).

Once the past is lost, so is she.41 The solution seems to her to lie in her lost notebooks, a diary which she was encouraged to keep by her husband of their life together, which had been left with her mother-in-law. Tamina makes two attempts to have someone collect the notebooks for her. Both come to nothing. The second is especially disastrous. She submits to the sexual advances of Hugo, a pretentious and unattractive young intellectual, because he promises to go to Czechoslovakia to collect the notebooks. She discovers, not only that he will not fulfill his promise, but that the unpleasant sexual encounters have blotted out more memories of her husband. She realized that . . .she could no longer visualize her husband’s genitals and pubic thatch, that the memory of revulsion is therefore stronger than the memory of tenderness. . .and that nothing is going to remain in her poor head than this boy with bad breath, and she vomited, doubled up and vomited (159).

Tamina gives up the task of regaining the lost notebooks, and returns, in apathy or despair, to her work as a waitress. Until – “on the fateful day” – a young man in a red sports car, who is named Raphael and who may be the Angel of Healing, comes to the café where she works.42 Raphael offers both diagnosis and remedy. Tamina’s memories are no longer of her dead husband; “she is only looking behind her into space.” What she suffers from is not memory, but remorse: Tamina will never forgive herself for forgetting. “So what should I do?” asks Tamina. “Forget your forgetting,” says the young man (224).

And the young man promises to take Tamina away, “Some place where things are as light as the breeze. Where things have lost their weight. Where there’s no remorse” (224).

The place “where things have lost their weight” is a place where there is no responsibility to remember; where one can forget without remorse and remember without regret or guilt. C


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Raphael takes Tamina to an island of children. Why children? Because, Kundera suggests, children “have no past.” This means that they are capable of happiness untainted by remorse or regret. The island of children provides a model for a world in which unalloyed happiness is possible.43 It was this utopia that Gustav Husak, the President of Czechoslovakia, had in mind when he said: “Children! You are the future!” (239). What he meant by this was not that the children will grow up, but that “childhood is the image of the future” (257), a future which will not carry the burdens of the past. Much of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is about the various attempts by the Communist government to rewrite their own history: disgraced former comrades are air brushed out of photos, monuments torn down, official histories rewritten, and the like. But Kundera discerns another strategy: to destroy the moral burden of the past. This does not mean that all knowledge of the past will be eliminated. If that were the goal, it would hardly be necessary to remake that knowledge in accordance with the political dictates of the current regime. Husak’s project, as that of Raphael, is to destroy the moral presence of the past. If we have memories, they are no longer conceived as a source of present commitment or responsibility, let alone guilt or remorse.44 We need no longer mourn the past, or for that matter celebrate it. We may retain cognitive memory; however conative memory, memory of the will, will have disappeared. Raphael, the herald of a weightless future, offers Tamina a return to the innocence of childhood. And for a while she enjoys it: she is able to cast off adult inhibitions about nakedness and communal living, and to enjoy the children’s games and her success in them. She returns to a time in her life before she met her husband, “when he was neither in memory nor in desire, and thus when there was neither weight nor remorse” (241). She is even able to enjoy the casual sensuality, then sexuality, of the children’s relations with her. But darker aspects of the community of children emerge. Sensuality turns easily into cruelty; Tamina’s presence provokes rivalry and then hostility; she is excluded from the group, and subject to humiliation and brutality. She attempts to escape from the island, only to discover after a night in the water, that she has made no distance at all. Exhausted, watched by the children, who make no effort to save her, she begins to sink: “Her legs were getting heavier and heavier. They were dragging her down like weights” (262). Tamina’s flight from a weightless existence is betrayed by the weight of her adult human body. Ironically, her drowning is a successful repetition of a failed attempt to commit suicide after her husband’s death. Kundera, or his authorial persona, also feels the attraction of a life unburdened by the past. It allows for a certain kind of community. With something like envy, Kundera watches a festival in which young and not so young Communists danced and sang together through the streets of Prague. There was no thought for the lost comrades, those who had been hung or languished in cells not so very far away. As he watched the communal orgy of forgetfulness, Kundera imagined that the celebrants were able, literally, to rise into the air: I realized with anguish in my heart that they were flying like birds and I was falling like a stone, that they had wings and I would never have any (94 – 95).45

But the costs of this community are enormous. They lie, not merely in the ruined lives of those who are betrayed, imprisoned, murdered, and forgotten, but also in the relentless superficiality of the emotional and cultural life that it offers. No doubt memory, and the regret, remorse, and guilt it brings with it, destroys the possibility of unalloyed happiness. But it is also a condition of the possibility of enduring emotions and committed relationships. To fall in love or to form a friendship is to make a commitment for the future. It embodies the belief that one’s future self will not merely take responsibility for one’s present acts, but

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feel the emotions that inform them. It is to project one’s present self into the future and to be certain that the future self will recognize one’s current emotions and commitments as its own.46 Children, at least as Kundera imagined them, are not capable of this. For them, life is a sequence of separate, self-contained sensations. They will feel pleasure and pain, satisfaction and frustration; but they will not feel the despair of unrequited love, the agony of guilt, nor the long period of grief that follows the loss of a loved one. Sex, divorced from the possibility of love, becomes mere sensuality: it reverts to “what it had originally been: a small toy for the production of physical pleasure” (250). Of course, there are gains to this. If love was a “paradise,” it was also a “hell,” involving “constant tension, fear, agitation” (250). But without these, emotional life of any depth is not possible. Raphael, the angel of healing, and Husak, the “President of Forgetting” (249), offer the same remedy: to exchange the complexity and occasional depth of adult life for the innocent happiness of the child. But as the island of children shows, innocence is compatible with brutality, exclusion, rape, and murder. Because the past does not count for the children, they feel no responsibility for it. They can confront the future without the burden of remorse or regret. This allows for an innocent happiness; but it is an innocence which is capable of the vilest of crimes. Was there an alternative therapy for Tamina? Perhaps not. It is significant that Tamina’s husband, like Beloved, lacks a name – at least, Tamina never uses it. If she had, she might have discovered a more secure link to her husband than that provided by her fleeting and incomplete memories. In other contexts, the name of the dead person functions as a link between the private grief of intimates and the public rituals of commemoration and farewell. While the rituals are not a substitute for the grief, they provide a context in which it can be expressed, shared and recognized. But Tamina is in exile. She has no friends. Her husband’s death was a random event, unconnected with their lives together or other projects of his life. Though he was involved in political activities, there is no suggestion that he had comrades in the struggle who might have wanted to commemorate his role. Neither his nor Tamina’s relatives show any ongoing interest in his life. When Tamina had sent death announcements to friends, she had received no response (134). If it were not for Tamina, it would be as if he had never lived. However Tamina is not capable of fulfilling the responsibility of remembrance. This is not just, as it seemed to her, that her memory was not up to the task. That was inevitable. It was rather that Tamina herself had ceased to be part of the world. She has no interests or commitments outside her husband. If “she has no desire to talk about herself” (110), this is in large part because there is nothing to say. Tamina’s husband was not merely a part of her life; he was her life. During his life, her only projects were his. After his death, her only project is to remember him. She is “a bit of lawn” on which grows only “a single rose, the memory of her husband” (115). But the rose is surrounded by high walls: no one else is aware of its existence. However carefully she tenders the rose, it will remain for the world as if her husband had never existed. Tamina’s backward looking existence is not as much a commemoration of her husband’s life as an ongoing participation in his death. When she drops out of her exiguous life at the café, she leaves hardly a trace. For the outside world, it will soon be as if she too had never existed.

V. Forgetting All action requires forgetting. . . Friedrich Nietzsche47 C


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Raphael’s therapy promises a life without the burden of the past, a life without regret or remorse, guilt or mourning. It offers the possibility of an unflawed happiness: an experience of the present unmarred by a sense of what went before. But the costs are enormous. It allows sensory pleasure but not love or friendship; innocence, but not guilt or remorse. As even the passive Tamina recognized, it is not a life for adult human beings (nor for children – but that is another story). Our life is one in which the past is a constituent of the present and our responsibilities to what has been constrain our aspirations for what will be. But how much of the past should we admit to the present? Must we always be haunted by the past? Sometimes the demands of the past are relatively easy to meet. I made a promise yesterday; I keep it today. In other cases, they may be difficult but it is at least clear what would count as meeting them. When Young Fortinbras claimed the rights of memory, he did so with the confidence that he had fulfilled his obligations to the past. Hamlet had a more difficult, perhaps impossible task: it was not clear what would count as putting his ghosts to rest. The claims of Beloved were even more intractable. The loss she represented was enormous. She was a child murdered by a desperate mother; or she was a sexually abused young woman; or she was a representative of the millions of lives ruined in the centuries of North American slavery? There is no project that might successfully respond to the enormity of the loss represented by Beloved, and no point at which her demands will be satisfied. As a child (though in the body of a young woman), she represents the insatiability of the past. Given the chance, she will devour the present. Beloved is of course an extreme case. However, the problem she represents is a pervasive one. Raphael’s experiment shows that we cannot ignore the claims of the past. But how do we stop these claims destroying the present? I doubt whether there is a general answer to this question; at any rate, I will not attempt to provide it here. But it is important to see precisely why individuals and communities must sometimes turn their back on the past. This is partly because the past is insatiable, and an attempt to meet all its demands would be endless. Anything but a selective response to the past will swallow up all concern for the future. There is also the problem that in the attempt to overcome the past, one reproduces it. It is, as Nietzsche argued, in his account of what he called “herd morality,” to remain within the field of force of the structures which enabled those injuries.48 If the past is one of injustice and oppression, the attempt to address the past reproduces the individual as the innocent and powerless victim of the injustice and oppression. Because the injuries of the past form the basis of their claims on the present, the claimants develop an investment in those injuries. Their sense of themselves is as bearers of the wounds of the past. They demand justice: recognition of their past suffering; compensation; perhaps punishment of those responsible. But nothing they achieve will satisfy their demands. The wounds will remain open.49 With a kind of inevitability, the struggle for justice reproduces the conceptual logic of oppression.50 Of the protagonists of Beloved, it is Denver who most clearly recognizes that it is important to refuse the demands of the past. She leaves the ghost-ridden house at 124 Bluestone Road, initially for help, but then to seek education, love, and a new life. Though she encourages Paul D to return to Sethe, it is clear that her own life is elsewhere (266–67). There is a certain brutality in this: she turns away from her “lost” (her word) mother. But it is necessary. If action is to be something more than repetition; if it to attempt to create something new, it must be prepared to turn its back on the past. As Nietzsche argued, “[a]nyone who acts” must be “without conscience,” . . . he forgets most things in order to do one thing, he is unjust to whatever lies behind him and recognizes only one right, the right of what is to be. 51

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This is not a return or a regression to a childlike form of life in which the past does not exist for us. We are, and the children we were have become, historical beings, and this means that the past is always a presence for us. Forgetting the past is not a result of the inability to remember, but is an act of strength. Nietzsche celebrates the power of humans to “shape” the past, to “assimilate what is past and alien, to heal wounds, to replace what is lost, to recreate broken forms out of itself alone.”52 But this capacity to remake the past is limited; some events cannot be assimilated, some wounds cannot be healed, and some broken forms cannot be recreated. Just what these limits are, Nietzsche tells us, is a matter of the strength of the individual or group; what must also be relevant, though Nietzsche does not mention it, is the extent of the damage contained in the past. But it is also a matter of strength to recognize these limits and to draw a line between what we have the capacity to assimilate, heal, replace and recreate, and what is beyond our capacity. That we draw these limits is essential to any worthwhile form of human life: Cheerfulness, good conscience, joyous deeds, faith in what is to come – all this depends, both in the instance of the individual as well as in a people, on whether there is a line that segregates what is discernible and bright from what is unilluminable and obscure; on whether one knows how to forget things at the proper time just as well as one knows how to remember at the proper time; on whether one senses with a powerful instinct which occasions should be experienced historically, and which ahistorically. 53

That one “knows how to forget,” indeed, that one has the strength to forget, is essential for action. The person who acts must be prepared to put aside the claims of the past. The freedom to make a new life must claim priority over seeking justice for the wrongs of the past. Denver, the living sister, must displace Beloved, the dead one. It may be that as a person or a people gains strength, they may develop the capacity to extend the horizons of memory. The stories they tell of the past will include those who were previously excluded, and the rights of memory of many of those forgotten will be recognized. But in the meantime, Beloved, and the millions like her, will be pushed aside. This does not mean they will disappear. They will continue to exist, just outside the limits of memory. Though their stories are not told, their voices will be heard, even by those who do not respond to them. However necessary the break from the past, it will not be complete. Haunting is not the least of the legacies of oppression.

NOTES My thanks to students and colleagues at the New School for providing a sympathetic and critical audience for earlier versions of this paper, and to Jeff Blustein, Irit Dekel, Lisabeth During, John Kleinig, and Paul Kottman, for comments on an earlier draft. 1. Henri Bergson, Matter & Memory, trans. N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991), ch. 3, 145. 2. See the Second Essay of On the Genealogy of Morals. References here will be to the translation by Walter Kaufmann & R.J. Hollingdale, On the Genealogy of Morals; Ecce Homo (New York: Vintage, 1989). 3. Ibid., Essay Two, §1, 57–8. The “right to make promises” translates “das versprechen darf,” literally “is allowed to make promises.” 4. This metaphor is at Theaetetus, 197b – 199b, in Plato, Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper (Indiana & Cambridge: Hacket Publishing, 1997), 218 – 20. Plato’s more influential model is an inscription on a wax tablet; see Theaetetus 191c – 195 a, Complete Works, 212 – 16. See the discussion of the two

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models in Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), 214–16. 5. Cp. Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press, 2002), 55–8. 6. According to E. Jentsch, “In telling a story, one of the most successful devices for easily creating uncanny effects is to leave the reader in uncertainty whether a particular figure in the story is a human being or an automaton. . .” Freud cites this passage in “The Uncanny,” first published 1919; reprinted in The Pelican Freud Library, Vol. 14: Art and Literature (London: Penguin Books, 1985), 347. However, Freud focuses his account on the object of the uncertainty (whether the figure is a human being or an automaton) rather than the uncertainty itself. 7. Ibid., 345. 8. Ibid., 347. 9. Freud states his conclusion as follows: “an uncanny experience occurs either when infantile complexes which have been repressed are once more revived by some impression or when primitive beliefs which have been surmounted seem once more to be confirmed.” He goes on to say that the distinction is often blurred, but that this is not surprising “when we consider that primitive beliefs are most intimately connected with infantile complexes, and are, in fact, based on them.” ibid., 372. 10. For criticisms of Freud along these lines, see Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 50–58. 11. For example, the appearance of the ghost to Hamlet in Act 3, Scene iv. I discuss this below. 12. In appealing to the “everyday,” we must not assume simplicity or lucidity. The everyday may well resolve into the mysterious on closer examination. 13. I do not recall having seen a stage production of Hamlet which includes this scene. It is omitted from the film versions of both Laurence Olivier in 1948 (with Olivier as Hamlet) and Franco Zeffirelli in 1990 (with Mel Gibson) – not surprisingly, since Fortinbras himself is excised from both these versions. It is included in John Gielgud’s 1964 Broadway production (with Richard Burton), which is available on DVD, and also in Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 film (with Branagh), which omits none of the text. It is a virtue of Branagh’s film that due weight is given to the political meaning of the play. In the final act, Fortinbras’ troops smash the statue of the old King Hamlet. This is especially significant as Branagh used the statue to represent the ghost. This scene is omitted from the final Folio edition of Hamlet, as are some others which emphasize the political context of the drama. James Shapiro, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 (New York and London: Harper Collins, 2005) argues that this represents a deliberate change of focus on Shakespeare’s part. If Shapiro is right (and I am not persuaded), there are two Hamlets, and my interpretation applies primarily to the first. 14. Francis Barker speaks perceptively of “Hamlet’s anachronistic inwardness”; see The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (London and New York: Methuen, 1984), 23. 15. In Macbeth, for example, the ghost of Banquo appears to Macbeth, but to no one else at the banquet. In Julius Caesar, the ghost of Caesar appears to Brutus in the privacy of his quarters. 16. The ghost appears publicly five times: twice before the play begins (to Barnardo and Marcellus), then twice in I.i (to Barnardo, Marcellus and Horatio), and then again in I.iv – v (this time to Hamlet, as well as the other three). When it appears again later, in Gertrude’s bedchamber after Hamlet has killed Polonius (III.iv), it is only apparent to Hamlet. Gertrude assumes, reasonably enough, that it is a figment of Hamlet’s imagination (a ‘coinage of your brain’, III.iv.157). I will say something of this difference later. 17. Alert readers will have noticed traces of Hegel’s argument in Section I of this paper. 18. G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art 1, translated by T.M. Knox, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975; reprinted 1998), 1: 230–1. 19. Hegel, Aesthetics Vol. 1, 231; see also in slightly more detail, 583–4. 20. It may be significant that this passage appears in the Second Quarto edition, but not in the later First Folio. See note 13 above for a brief discussion of this issue. 21. I here follow Quentin Skinner, “The State” in Terence Ball et al. eds., Political Innovation and Conceptual Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); reprinted in Robert E. Goodin and Philip Pettit eds., Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Anthology (Oxford & Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003); pages references to the latter. According to Skinner: “It would not perhaps be too bold to assert . . . that in all the discussions about the state and government of princes in the first half of the sixteenth century, there will be found scarcely any instance in which the e´ tat, staat or state in question is unequivocally separated from the status or standing of the prince himself,” 9. In Hamlet, it falls to Guildenstern and Rosencrantz to articulate this conception of political rule; see III, iii, 8 – 24. Rosencrantz describes the position of the king as akin to an enormous wheel, ‘To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things are mortised and adjoined. . .’ (21–2).

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22. The theological implications of this complaint and, more broadly, of the ghost itself, are explored in Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory; see especially Chapter Five. 23. Johan Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, in Goethe: The Collected Works (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 9:146. 24. It is of course Montesquieu’s view that honor is the principle of monarchical rule, i.e. it is the “passion” which “makes all the parts of the body politic move.” See The Spirit of the Laws (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), Part I, Book 3, Chapters 1, 5–7, and 21; 25–28. For Montesquieu, honor binds the nobility to the political order; however, he recognizes that it can also threaten it; see Book 4, Chapter 2. 25. Honor is a significant theme in a number of Shakespeare’s plays. Falstaff’s attack on honor (“Can honor set a leg? . . .. What is honor? A word . . .”) is well known; see Henry IV Part I V, I, 127–140. It is less often noted that the Bolingbrokes and their supporters – Henry IV, Prince Hal, Westmoreland – represent a much more effective attack on the code of honor. The representatives of honor – Hotspur, in Part I, Mowbray in Part II – are both defeated. In Troilus and Cressida, Hector is the man of honor; he is outwitted in debate by the glory seeking Troilus and on the battlefield by the treacherous Achilles. Hamlet and Falstaff’s arguments foreshadow Mandeville’s scathing attack on the honor code; see The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Publick Benefits, edited by F.B. Kaye (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1988), Remark (R), 1: 198–223. For an influential account of the displacement of honor, see Peter Berger, “On the Obsolescence of the Concept of Honor,” European Journal of Sociology 11 (1970): 339–47, reprinted in Michael Sandel ed., Liberalism and Its Critics (Oxford: Blackwell. 1984). 26. At least, if we are to trust the stage directions in the unsatisfactory First Quarto. However, as Stephen Greenblatt observes, this detail corresponds “to the fantasies on which Hamlet’s mind queasily dwells”; see Hamlet in Purgatory, 222–3. If, as some editors have suggested, the First Quarto was put together from memory from the initial performances, the detail may correspond to the first staging. 27. Freud sketches in this interpretation in The Interpretation of Dreams, first published in 1900; see The Pelican Freud Library Volume 4 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976), 366–68. It is developed at greater length in Ernest Jones, Hamlet and Oedipus (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1954). 28. T.S. Eliot suggests that ‘none of the possible actions’ available to Hamlet can appropriately express – “satisfy” – the “disgust” that he feels for his mother (a disgust which Eliot undoubtedly shares). See “Hamlet” (1919), reprinted in T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays (London & Boston: Faber & Faber, 1991). 29. Quoted in W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 183. Mitchell does not give the source. 30. Toni Morrison, Beloved (First published 1987; reprinted New York: Penguin Putnam, 1998); pages references will be given in parentheses in the text. 31. See Thomas W. Laqueur, “Memory and Naming in the Great War” in John R. Gillis ed., Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1996). Laqueur cites a passage from Henry V in which a duke, an earl, a knight and a squire are reported as having been killed in the Battle of Agincourt, but “None else of name” (IV, viii, 109); and a similar passage from Much Ado about Nothing, in which a herald reports the casualties in a battle as “few of any sort, and none of name” (I, I, 6–7). 32. As we shall see below, the efforts of Kundera’s heroine, Tamina, to remember her dead husband are frustrated by the fact that Kundera does not provide him with a name. In this passage, I follow the view developed by Saul Kripke that names are “rigid designators,” that is, that they pick out the individual to who they are assigned independently of the various contingencies of his or her life (more technically: they designate the same individual in all possible worlds); see Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972; 2nd edition 1980). Kripke does not discuss why certain beings are assigned names while others are not, and whom has the right to assign names. To give something a name is to acknowledge its communal significance. The administrators of Nazi death camps recognized this when they denied their prisoners names and assigned them numbers. Slave owners were less consistent in that they continued the use of personal names. However, they asserted the right of naming. Baby Suggs discovers that she is owned under the name ‘Jenny Whitelaw’; she acquired the name ‘Baby Suggs’ from her husband (139–42). Stamp Paid signals his freedom by giving himself a new name (184–5, 232–33). Kripke’s view that names do not as such have descriptive contents needs some supplementation to deal with the significance of Stamp Paid’s choice of name: that past debts were paid. 33. See Avishai Margalit, Ethics and Memory, especially 18–26. Margalit argues that commemoration, especially commemoration through names, “is basically a religious project to secure some form of immortality,” 25. On this view it is mysterious why religious groups who already believe in immortality would bother with commemoration. It also misunderstands the semantics of proper names. My use of the

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name ‘Julius Caesar’ no more brings him into the present, than my use of ‘Avishai Margalit’ brings him into my study. 34. The epigraph or dedication to Beloved is “Sixty Million and more.” 35. W.J.T. Mitchell asks: “What if the materials of memory are overwhelming, so traumatic that the remembering of them threatens identity rather than reconstituting it?” See Picture Theory, 200. 36. Thanks to Irit Dekel for pointing out the relationship between memory and membership. 37. W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory, 203–5. 38. Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (New York: Harper Perennial, 1999), 257. This was first published in Czech in 1978, and translated into English in 1980. Kundera revised the work in a 1985 French translation, and this revised version was translated into English by Aaron Asher. Page references will be given in the text. 39. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 253. 40. This would be the view of a systematic utilitarian. If everything of value resides in the future, the past is only relevant as a source of knowledge. To conceive of the past as an independent source of responsibility and commitment is simply irrational. Utilitarians might allow feelings of guilt and regret an instrumental role – to ensure better behavior in the future. But they cannot allow the past to constitute an independent source of responsibility. 41. Is Tamina a melancholic? Perhaps, though she does not seem to have had the ambivalence towards her husband which Freud regarded as crucial; see “Mourning and Melancholia,” especially 252. Still, there are other signs, especially as she loses the ability clearly to identify the lost object. 42. According to Kundera, the novel is “about laughter and about forgetting, about forgetting and about Prague, about Prague and about the angels. So it is not by chance that the young man sitting at the wheel is named Raphael” (227). Raphael had played a small role in an earlier episode in the novel Part One, also called “Lost Letters.” The dissident Mirek is returning from a fruitless quest to obtain letters that he had written to a past lover when a red sports car cuts in between Mirek’s car and that of the security police following him (27). This enables a moment of recognition: Mirek had once been hopelessly in love with someone of whom he was now ashamed. His attempt to obtain the letters was part of the project of rewriting his past in the name of a “perfect and beautiful” destiny (13). It was precisely parallel with the Czech state’s attempts to transform its past. But the recognition is fleeting (30–31). 43. No doubt Husak follows Nietzsche on this. See Unfashionable Observations, translated by Richard T. Gray (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), Second Piece, “On the Utility and Liability of History for Life,” 88, where he speaks of “a child, which, not yet having a pass to disown, plays in blissful blindness between the fences of past and future.” 44. The two strategies are related. Once knowledge of the past is formed in accordance with the needs of the present, it can no longer provide a moral constraint on the present. The argument here is parallel to Max Weber’s argument about the ‘disenchantment of the world’. See Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977). 45. Nietzsche too suggests that a life without memory, as of children or animals, moves us “as though it were the vision of a lost paradise”; see “On the Utility and Liability of History for Life,” 88. 46. See the discussion in Margalit, The Ethics of Memory, especially 26–30. 47. Nietzsche, “On the Utility and Liability of History for Life,” 89. 48. See On the Genealogy of Morals, Essay One. In this paragraph, I follow Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), Chapter 3, “Wounded Attachments.” 49. It is possible to resolve past injustices where there is perfect equivalence between a present act and a past wrong. If a loss is purely financial then money compensation is possible. The Kantian framework of universal law provides a moral currency in terms of which an equivalent might be determined. It is in this sense that retributivists sometimes speak of reparation or punishment ‘annulling’ the crime. See, for example, Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, translated by T.M. Knox (London, Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), First Part, (iii) (c), 66–74. However, as Hegel recognized, there is an element of irreducible particularity in every loss, and for this there is no equivalent. These losses cannot be expressed in purely universal terms, so there is nothing that can be done which might be conceived as canceling the loss. 50. It is a paradox of the movement for financial reparations for slavery that in seeking a payment for its suffering and losses, it reproduces the moral structure of a system in which the value of human lives is expressed in money. 51. Nietzsche, “On the Utility and Liability of History for Life,” 92. 52. Ibid., 89. Nietzsche’s account of this “power. . .to heal wounds, to replace what is lost, recreate broken forms” seems to conflict with the claim in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part 2, “On Redemption” that

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“The will cannot will backwards; and that he cannot break time and time’s covetousness, that is the will’s secret melancholy.” See The Portable Nietzsche, edited by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1996), 251, and the discussion in Brown, “Wounded Attachments,” 71 – 73. There is, however, both continuity and complementarity. Zarathustra does not deny some capacity to change the past – at least, the meaning of the past; indeed, the doctrine of eternal recurrence requires a changed interpretation of the past. Zarathustra also comes to recognize the limits of this capacity to reinterpret the past. 53. Nietzsche, “On the Utility and Liability of History for Life,” 90.

Ross Poole teaches philosophy and politics at the New School for Social Research. He is the author of Morality and Modernity (Routledge, 1991) and Nation and Identity (Routledge, 1999), and is currently working on a book entitled Past Justice.

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