Hauntology in Practice: Commemorating Partition in the Age of Brexit

Abstract

Hauntology in Practice:Commemorating Partition in the Age of Brexit Jonathan Evershed (bio) and Rebecca Graff-McRae (bio) "Full Derrida. I'm hauntology in practice, an aporia upon which meaning depends, the emptiness at the logocentre, as it were."1 Brexit is haunted by the ghost(s) of partition. Since June 2016 the vexatious specter of the Irish border has returned to haunt Irish, British, and wider European politics in a way not seen since the height of the Troubles.2 In rolling news coverage and opinion columns, on social media, and even in the pages of a book that it had purportedly authored (I Am the Border, So I Am, 2019), the border has found new ways to interrupt present political settlements and to disrupt and reshape the relationships and meanings that define contemporary politics on and across "these islands."3 Crucially, the disruptive return of the border and its divisive politics has given the lie to an assumption that had underpinned the Decade of Centenaries and its prevailing narratives on "reconciliation,"4 namely, that the vexatious question of the border had been all but successfully exorcised from political life in Ireland, North and South. Claims by the British [End Page 312] and Irish governments, political figures, and cultural commentators that the Decade of Centenaries has marked and aided in Ireland's "overcoming" of past conflicts—between "Unionist" and "Nationalist," "British" and "Irish"—have been revealed as profoundly problematic. A divided and unstable present continues to frame how the ghosts of a violent past are received and represented. Building on previous work undertaken by the authors on the hauntology of commemoration in Ireland and drawing on a series of ethnographic interviews with key stakeholders in the centenary of partition, this article will situate the centenary and its multiple narratives within a political context determined by the fallout of Brexit on the island of Ireland, thus mapping this anniversary within the fluid and shifting political dynamics that it both mirrors and serves to shape.5 Highlighting the ambivalent and transfigurative nature of commemorative politics, we propose hauntology as a useful lens through which to read commemoration during the Decade of Centenaries, with the term itself a form of political intervention that creates and sustains conflict even as it lays claim to having overcome it. Applying a hauntological lens offers a vocabulary—a lexicon—to describe the temporal and ontological (dis)juncture of history, memory, and politics at the centenary of partition. Hauntology both permits and forces us to ask "how does commemoration reproduce and reconfigure the power-discursive relations between the dead of the past and the politics of the present?"6 Crucially, hauntology is also a method of disrupting claims to foundational narratives and asking "in what ways are the foundations of the state and the nation both (contentiously) laid upon the graveyard of history?"7 To name the ghost is to acknowledge the multiple paradoxes of social and political memory—notably absence/presence, past/present, continuity/rupture. As Evershed suggests: [End Page 313] [Ghosts] exist somewhere between the real and the imagined, structure and agency, signifier and signified. They carry messages from the past that can act to compel particular forms of individual or collective action, but they also require forms of action in order that these messages might be received.8 Commemoration is quite literally "a prayer to be haunted,"9 conjuring into the political present the restless ghosts of a troubled past in an attempt to fix or control the meaning of the message they carry. Such an attempt is necessarily and contentiously political, as these meanings are always multiple and conflicted.10 To explore the centenary of partition hauntologically is to follow those involved in commemorating (or indeed not commemorating) it as they convene with its ghosts; it is to ask "how they interpret [these] 'ghosts' and how they use them as a source of knowledge."11 It is to examine how this contributes to contemporary political conflict about borders and bordering on the island of Ireland. Whereas commemoration navigates geographical and politico-spatial borders, the ghosts of time cross paths with ghosts of space and place. The confluence of Brexit and the centenary...