...future. Heidegger's ontological Benjamin's messianic conceptions of time can be used to undermine dominant legal temporality. But only return to Athens and politics promises resistance and reconciliation.]



CONTENTS Thesis I Thesis II Thesis III Thesis IV Thesis V Thesis VI Thesis VII Thesis VIII

In his Hellenica, Xenophon relates an extraordinary story. (1) In 403 BCE, when the Peloponnesian War had ended, the Athenian Democrats defeated the 30 tyrants who were ruling Athens subsequent to a coup. Cleocritos, the representative of the Democratic Party, could have acted as a vengeful conqueror and demanded the punishment of his enemies for the brutalities they had committed. Instead, his call to the Athenians was, 'let us forget the evils of the past.' (2) The demos passed a decree banning the recollection of these traumatic events and the raising of lawsuits related to them, and the citizens took the oath: me mnesikakein--not to remember the evils but also not to use memory as a tool for evil. (3) A clause in the decree exempted only the 30 tyrants and 31 of their henchmen. Instead, these 61 were executed. When one of the Democrats objected to the imposed forgetting, he was brought before the demos by the Democrat Archinos and sentenced to death. (4) After that, the evils of the past were forgotten.

There are clear precedents to this story. Herodotus relates the first prohibition on memory. (5) The Persians put down a rebellion of the Ionians in Asia Minor in 494 BCE. They conquered and pillaged the city of Miletos and set fire to its altars and temples. The Athenians were devastated by the catastrophe that had befallen their brothers in Miletos. When the earliest tragedian Phrynichus produced The Taking of Miletus, the Athenians were deeply moved; they cried and mourned and hated it. They fined Phrynichos 1000 drachmas because he had reminded them of their own misfortunes. It was decreed that the play should never be performed again, because it recalled the pathe, the passion of their kin, the Ionians and their polis; ie, the destruction of political identity. (6) The tragedy was condemned to Lethe, the fiver of oblivion.

The importance of forgetting is also found in the mythology of Athens. According to Plutarch, when Poseidon lost his contest with Goddess Athena to become the protector of Athens, he did not express a desire for revenge. The grateful Athenians deleted from their calendar the day of the battle, the second day of the month of voidromionos (September), because it was a sad memory for Poseidon, and they built an altar to Lethe on Acropolis. (7) The banned day initiated the institution of what the Romans called Dies Fasti and Nefasti--banned days, days of mourning on which only certain religious and legal acts could take place. The Greek word is imera apofras--the day that cannot be spoken. We can say that the lost day, the second of voidromionos, is the day of the polis, the time of politics, a time intimately linked with the origins of tragedy, the beginning of Western literature. Aristotle agrees, arguing that politics is what gives rise to revenge, or brings an end to it. (8)

Some 23 centuries later, the great historian of the French Revolution, Jules Michelet, wrote:

each death leaves something good behind, and demands that it be recalled. The magistrates must supply friends to those who have none. Because law and justice are more certain than our forgotten tenderness because our tears are shed so quickly, this magistracy is History ... I have exhumed the dead for a second life ... they live now with us who have become their parents, their friends. Thus a family is created, a common city between the living and the dead. (9)

The strong link between memory, law and justice indicates that modern law and historiography have a common birthday. But in a transformation of huge consequence, memory and its recollection have now been largely entrusted to law and judicial proceedings. Nuremberg and Tokyo; the Eichmann, (10) Barbie (11) and Papon (12) trials; and the post-conflict trials of Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Iraq have put history in the dock. In the Holocaust denial trials in Canada, (13) in the libel case of David Irving in England (14) and in the criminal proceedings against him in Austria, (15) historiography itself is put on trial. Finally, official remembrance rituals have been entrusted to quasi-legal procedures, most importantly that conducted by the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission ('TRC'). Judicial proceedings have become one of our culture's essential responses to violence. Finding or telling the truth will hopefully reconcile heavily traumatised societies and cultures and allow new beginnings. What are the stakes in this transformation from history as the judge to the judge as historian?

Michelet writes on behalf of the dead but judges on behalf of the living, turning the dialogue between the two onto a 'common city': republican France. (16) The exhumation of the dead aimed to show how their sacrifices led to revolution and the creation of the French nation. This speaking for the dead in order to explain the importance of the living was the main trope of modern historiography and in particular of European nationalism. At the origin of the nation we find a story of the nation's origin.

But this conception of history has come under pressure in the last 30 years. First, the idea of collective memory, introduced by the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs in the 1920s, and dismissed by some historians, argues that memories are not mechanical inscriptions of the past on the mind, but a continuous and creative reconstruction under the influence of current concerns, pressures and fears. (17) People view the past from the perspective of the present by placing themselves within the context of their communities, whether they are ethnic, class, political, professional, familial, or communities of another kind. (18) Collective memory is determined by the communities and networks in which people find themselves; it is not unitary, but pluralistic and polyvalent.

Then came the interest in the history of dominated, excluded, subaltern groups--local histories and counter-narratives that challenged the canonical national myths. This fragmentation was further strengthened by the postmodern turn in historiography, for which history-writing was a narrative construction not radically different from literature. Postmodern historians turned towards the tricks of texts, emplotment, deep narrative structure, rhetorical devices and aesthetic criteria. Both primary materials--the bread and butter of the professional historian--and historiographies themselves were now examined for their uncertainties, ambiguities and ruses. The impurities of the written text would not be overlooked.

Professional historians are clearly...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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