The Politics and Promise of Memory

Abstract

This chapter takes the White Terror in Taiwan as an example to address the political and ethical questions concerning the act of bearing witness and the archive. Departing from the current scholarship which tends to inscribe the White Terror testimony into the grand historical narrative of Taiwan’s democratisation, I instead address the political, ethical, affective and ontological complexities of memory, life itself and projects of justice. I will first look at the technical aspects of the archive and, by drawing on Stiegler and Derrida, examine how memory and life traces, and the drive to bear witness, remain in surplus over (collective and official) memorisation and archivisation. I will argue about the impossibility of bearing witness, which problematises legal and political categories and which I take to be the true ethical ground zero of working through disasters and traumas towards projects of justice, democracy and emancipation to come. Then, my discussion will turn to some testimonies of the White Terror considering how remnants, in Agambenian terms, undergo ontological dislocation, and what truths about life itself in their testimonies we bear witness to. In light of the philosophical works of ‘weak messianism’ by Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben, I aim at a critical intervention in current debates in Taiwan on identities, history and projects of transitional justice. It is hoped that this research will be an effective step towards a politicised theoretical framework of testimony and memory that may apply to post-totalitarian or post-traumatic societies in general.