Founding Faces

Abstract

In Edith Wyschogrod's 1998 book, An Ethics of Remembering: History, Heterology, and Nameless Others, we hear a small set of questions iterated around a theme, all pointing toward ongoing concerns for anyone who seeks to move insights of Continental philosophy into actual practice of social sciences, and out of small corners of theory still practiced in corners of some humanities departments. Her announced problem area is history, or rather how a present practice of remembering, as embodied by a should represent human past. So, for example, in her treatment of Derrida and grapheme that becomes spectacle, she names still current situation in mass culture, then asks some partly rhetorical questions: Today phenomena involving vast numbers of persons not only occur, but when they do they immediately become ocular, events to be captured in still and moving images. How is heterological to language of her time so that she may be understood, graphematically, as it were, from within cataclysm that cannot itself be pictured? How is she to counter culture's to anything whatsoever, thus even to picture cataclysm? How is she to use images to past without affect through image?1 I am going to pull out several themes from these few sentences, trying as carefully as possible to understand what would be relevant for a historian who wanted to be attentive to these questions. Someone who wanted to use approach to write, for example, about one of things normal historians write about, albeit in a different way. First, we note dual use of, and repeated insistence on, present historical moment, both in today - when we of a time where mass events occur, yet are immediately part of simulacra, part of available resources for systems of absolute representation - and need to in the language of her time, when one wants to of these events using representations and images that are available to everyone. Second, we note that structural part of demand to speak language of her time, if we pair that demand with refusal to submit to specular culture's claim to monopolizing forms of all possible representation, in its ability to simulate anything whatsoever, thus even to picture cataclysm, suggests that one may fail each of these tasks. It is a without material necessity - or yet more, a demand that one not allow necessity to determine how one must speak. Freedom, after all, is at stake in not having been duped by age. That also seems structural, that one will always have, in same event, that which refuses representation and representation itself, further complicates problem area. Third, we suspect that Wyschogrod's last question is loaded, or is merely rhetorical - we are perhaps meant to see, in other words, that demand to speak, through images that demonstrate past actualities is also answered when one avoids manipulating affect through image. The description of what has happened, historically, must somehow be otherwise than informative, yet cannot be a phenomenological description - at least not simply so, given that structures are chancy, and may be as rare to observe as a saint on Wall Street. One should worry that any such decision will become surreptitiously normative, and that idea of renunciation it preaches is, well, preachy. IfI may say so, my point is to be as reflexive as possible, without becoming simply paralyzed - I want to ask with Wyschogrod why a historian would want to be attentive to such questions, or rather, why one would want to be such a historian, given that it demands this peculiar sort of attenti veness, not to detail alone, but to incommensurable events (cataclysms) that do not convey information, but are found in those places where we are attentive to details. …