Dangerous Memory of Hope

Abstract

Dangerous Memory of Hope Martin Beck Matuštík What if Voltaire has been right and we live in the worst of all possible worlds? Voltaire's "amen" would nail the theodicy coffin of Leibnitz's "amen." But what if both "amens" get absorbed by an objectless hope in possible worlds? You and I live with hopes for something. If G-d is not an object in the world, G-d must be impossible. This speculatively militant deduction inverts Schelling's inverted or "reversed god" (2006, 54) against his spiritualized intensity of radical evil. Schelling's "in order that there be no evil, there would have to be no God" (2006, 66) intones "amen" to a preferred post-evil condition. Naming something as morally evil should become impossible if we have always already lived in a postgod condition. In our one and only world, nobody and nothing would need forgiveness for concrete hopes. Grammars of Hope If we conjugate all our verbs with sufficient hopes and so complete the "death of God" and the regicides of sovereignty in our grammars, would not our activist faith create an economy of exchange in which all wounds of history could be healed in time and with effort? Is not "amen" to this [End Page 350] world for which we are responsible a better meeting ground for an honest meditation? These questions address postsecular meditations on radical evil as a scarcity of hope. That evil does not exist was one of the three strategic claims of classical theodicy; the other two strategies would undermine either divine omnipotence (hence the weakness of divinities) or benevolence (hence the Manichaean or other moral fragility of divine goodness). I wish to set aside theoretical debates about the problem of evil as a problem about or for God, but please not out of neglect or irreverence for their classical and contemporary analytic importance. I want to begin with activists, fieldworkers, and critical theorists who in raising transient aims presuppose practical beginnings as possible. Many report how in the killing fields social theory stumbles over these very presuppositions. After humanitarians and warring peacekeepers intervene, how are the villagers to move back where they raped and killed each other's kin? The Difficulty of Beginnings Here are some examples of the difficulty of beginnings: Kaing Guek Eav, the chief torturer in the Tuol Sleng prison under the Khmer Rouge, pleaded for forgiveness during his U.N. trial on Cambodia, yet who is to respond to his supralegal and moral plea after the just sentence is handed down (Mydans 2009)?1 Nagase Takashi, a translator for Japanese torturers of the British POWs in Singapore was confronted with a torture victim, Eric Lomax (1995, in Griswold 2007, 95ff.). This took place many years after the 1940s ordeal. What now should be the sufficient hope for Takashi once even his hard-won, lifelong struggle for postwar self-forgiveness breaks down when he is suddenly faced with Lomax and his memory of unhealed wounds awakes? Jankélévitch (1967, in Derrida 2001, 27) concluded that forgiveness died in the Nazi death camps, but for Derrida (2001, 31), the unforgivable nature of the deeds and of the person who is their agent, rather than the legally imprescriptible crime, is precisely the type of event that calls for forgiveness. Wiesenthal (1998), a Jewish prisoner in a World War II concentration camp, was confronted by a dying SS soldier's request to forgive him on behalf of all Jews. How should one help Wiesenthal in his lifelong struggle with this young SS's deathbed request that no degree of success in hunting down the Nazi [End Page 351] criminals managed to answer? Are there no implications, no lessons for politics or social theory, in the cries of those who suffered, made others suffer, stood by suffering of the innocent? Can such cries be settled by economic accounting, moral reparations, legal punishment, public rituals of pardon, or generational forgiveness? Must not an honest activist admit not to own beginnings? Useless Activists Intransitive, useless activity abounds in our world: Prayers of great religions, not just Zen meditations, have no object, as the now-time is not rooted in the metaphysics...