Remembering Violence: Anthropological Perspectives on Intergenerational Transmission

Introduction

Remembering Violence:

Anthropological Perspectives on

Intergenerational Transmission

Nicolas Argenti and Katharina Schramm

How does violence affect remembering? How are the large–scale cataclysms, crises, disasters and dispersals that befall communities entrusted by one generation of witnesses to the next? If bearing witness to violence cannot be a disinterested act, and if memory – despite its relationship to the past – is always deployed in the present, a question arises regarding the mediation of memory, or the relationship of remembering to forgetting: How is memory partially (and necessarily) constituted by forgetting? What is the exact nature of the Faustian bargain between transmission and obliteration? If memories of large–scale man–made catastrophes are passed on from the original generation of victims and perpetrators to their children, how do inchoate, individual experiences of political violence – devoid as they often are of any logic, structure or narrative sense – coalesce into an accepted body of knowledge that can be coherently uttered and invested in collectively as legitimate and representative: how, in other words, do individual memories contributes to social memory before social memory can once again – now in the shape of postmemories (Hirsch 1997, 1999; Hirsch and Spitzer 2006: 85) – shape individual subjective experience in the dialectic of self and society?

The last few decades have seen a veritable explosion of studies of memory, not only in the humanities and the social sciences but also – and first of all – in public culture and contemporary politics. In popular culture as in academia today, memory sometimes seems to apply to a bewilderingly widening array of phenomena, some of which are apparently only tangentially or metaphorically related to what we commonly understand by memory. Increasing anxiety in academia regarding what constitutes memory (or remembering, remembrance, commemoration, and their ever–present antonyms, forgetting, obliteration and oblivion¹) and what qualifies as trauma or as post–traumatic stress highlights the role of memory as a site of struggle outside of academia and clinical practice, in society itself.

Memory is not a simple, unmediated reproduction of the past, but rather a selective re–creation that is dependent for its meaning on the remembering individual or community's contemporary social context, beliefs and aspirations (Huyssen 1995). Indeed, individual memories devoid of such contextualisation and the selective amnesia, telescoping and transformations they entail are considered pathological in their solipsistic detail and isolating particularity. At the collective level, similarly, we could not imagine a social reality in which all of the events of the past and all of the manifold ways in which those events were experienced and interpreted by a multitude of different individuals, factions and interest groups are somehow preserved in the present. By their very nature, the re–creations of the past produced by memory are partial, unstable, often contested, and prone to becoming sites of struggle. As Matt Matsuda puts it, ‘memory is not a generic term of analysis, but itself an object appropriated and politicized’ (1996: 6). At the individual and the collective level alike, these can even be ‘false’ memories, but this does not mean that they are not memories for all that, nor does it mean that the very real emotive and political salience with which these memories can be endowed and deployed are somehow void. In this sense, as Stephan Feuchtwang (2006) has recently demonstrated, even ‘false’ memories bear a relation to truths beyond their supposed originary events; a form of meta–truth about the present that is projected back in time.

Anxieties about the reliability of memory give rise to concerns regarding the aims and consequences of focusing on memory.² These concerns have been played out in part in a strict separation between memory and history (cf. Halbwachs 1992, Nora 1989, 1992), the former considered subjective, ‘living’, continuous and organic, and the latter objective, distanced, transformative and critical. Often, this distinction is accompanied by a dichotomy between non–literate or ‘simple’ (i.e. non–Western) and ‘modern’ or ‘complex’ (i.e. Western) societies (e.g. Nora 1989, 1992). Some writers have refuted this essentialist view, insisting on the areas of overlap between the two fields. Hirsch and Stewart (2005), for instance, very usefully distinguish between history and historicity; the latter term highlighting ‘the manner in which persons operating under the constraints of social ideologies make sense of the past, while anticipating the future’. Where history refers to an assumed empirically verifiable past, historicity ‘concerns the ongoing social production of accounts of pasts and futures.’ (Hirsch and Stewart 2005: 262).

The focus on memory in much emerging research similarly highlights the social construction of the past across cultures. In his attempt to extend the concept of memory beyond Maurice Halbwachs' presentist theory of social framing, Jan Assmann (1992) distinguishes between communicative memory – which is actively produced in social groups through everyday interactions – and what he calls cultural memory, which reaches much deeper into the past and is expressed in myths, genealogies or ‘traditions’ and lies outside the realm of the everyday. To him, the distinction between societies that ‘remember’ and those that ‘have history’, which underlies Pierre Nora's (1989, 1992) conception of lieux de mémoire, is a false dichotomy that elides the historical consciousness of non–literate societies. Writing on the dynamics of memory, history and forgetting in Madagascar, Jennifer Cole (2001) also blurs the clear–cut boundaries between memory and history, showing how historical consciousness might influence memorial practice and vice versa. Joining the sceptics in questioning the new ubiquity of memory, Michael Lambek (2006: 210–11) warns us that the very project of trying to locate a field of enquiry that escapes the hegemony and the monolithic essentialisations of history might paradoxically result in new discourses of authority that are themselves reifications of the oppressed and marginalised to whom the researcher seeks to give a voice:

The risk is that we assume that somewhere there exists pure and unsullied memory, memory which accurately reproduces the experience of its subjects and that is their unique possession, that holds and moulds their essence, that is itself an essence. In making ‘memory’ the object of study, we run the risk of naturalising the very phenomenon whose heightened presence or salience is in need of investigation (2006: 211).

Clearly, memory cannot be assumed to represent an objective past that has been excluded by historical practice and historiography. This would be to reproduce the essentialisation of some historical writing in contradistinction to which memory is looked to as an escape. Nevertheless, it may still be the case that memory – in all of its heterogeneity, its instability and its liability to contestation – represents ‘the history that cannot be written’ (Lambek 2006: 211; see also Gold and Gujar 2002). It is precisely because memory cannot be trusted as history that it needs to be explored, not as a record of the past, but of the present of those whose interests, views, experiences and life–worlds are somehow inimical to or have fallen outside of the historical project.

The contributions to this book restrict themselves to the specific question of how political violence is remembered, how memories of this violence are transmitted, and the uses to which the memories are put. So far, despite the all–pervading memory–boom, few collections have been explicitly concerned with an anthropological exploration of this subject. One of the early efforts in the field has been Richard Werbner's (1998) seminal edited volume on Memory and the Postcolony, the scope of which is limited to African(ist) perspectives on the violent configurations of the postcolonial state. Another, more recent volume, edited by Baruch Stier and J. Shawn Landres (2006), is concerned with the connection between religion, violence, memory and place, whereby the focus lies on mutual implications between the sacralisation of violence and the violence of religion, and not so much on the specifics of the relationship between violence and memory. Silverstein and Makdisi (2005) make the connection between violence and memory explicit; yet again their analyses are restricted to one contemporary situation, namely that in the Middle East and North Africa, where violence is a major factor of present–day politics. This volume, which is global in its scope, aims to contribute to the nascent anthropology of memory by focusing in particular on the issue of the intergenerational transmission of memories of violence.³

In an age in which discussing the subjective experience of political violence is impossible without reference to trauma and to post–traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), this volume raises questions as to whether the trauma paradigm is to be understood as an empirical description of a universal human psychic response to violence, as a Western culture–bound syndrome, as a folk model of suffering, as a social movement, or as a global discourse as manifold in its interpretations as it is pervasive in its reach. Is trauma an analytical model, or the latest social movement to which students of memory should devote their analytical attention? Can one move from an analytical model of individual, psychic trauma to one of collective or social trauma as one can between individual and collective memory?⁴ Can trauma (in its association with disruptiveness, inescapability and repetitiveness) and memory (in its connotations with identity, continuity and selectivity) be analytically joined to address the impact of past violence on the present? And if so, can the collective trauma of a generation of victims be passed to their offspring in the next generation, and how might this transference exactly take place?

To Ron Eyerman (2001) it is precisely the phenomenon of intergenerational transmission that produces what he calls ‘cultural trauma’. In his discussion of African American collective identity he distinguishes cultural from psychological or physical trauma as follows:

Cultural trauma refers to a dramatic loss of identity and meaning, a tear in the social fabric, affecting a group of people that has achieved some degree of cohesion. In this sense, the trauma need not necessarily be felt by everyone in a community or experienced directly by any or all. While it may be necessary to establish some event as the significant ‘cause’, its traumatic meaning must be established and accepted, a process which requires time, as well as mediation and representation (2001: 2).

In this model, present–day discrimination re–produces the trauma of racism, while slavery is nothing more nor less than the historical reference through which the ongoing contemporary experience is framed.

Thought–provoking and enlightening as humanist interpretations of the trauma paradigm such as these are, they are culturally and historically specific. Although the contributors to this volume, all of them anthropologists, are cognisant with and, to a greater or lesser degree, informed by recent theories of trauma, they have not started off with a clear–cut definition of what constitutes ‘trauma’ or the ‘memory of violence’, but rather inductively explored those questions on the basis of concrete ethnographic case studies.

From History to Memory and Back Again

Despite the controversy surrounding the term, the origins of the notion of collective memory in the social sciences can still be traced back to the work of Maurice Halbwachs (1992) and ultimately to his mentor Durkheim's notion of collective consciousness. Halbwachs' method is not to look to individual memories as the building blocks of collective memory, but simply to point out that individual memories cannot exist on their own, as dreams do, but are the result of regular intercourse with others. It therefore follows that what psychologists often take to be the most intimate realm of human thought and experience is in fact a result of collective social interaction. Individual memories are necessarily shared memories, and memories that are not shared are rapidly forgotten; they are therefore not memories at all (1992: 53).

Not only did Halbwachs make the case for collective memory, but he also broadened the range of phenomena that were to be considered as memories. In his case study concerning the Catholic rite of communion, for example, he argues convincingly that a contemporary practice that is engaged in and understood as such in fact re–enacts the death and resurrection of Christ that is believed to have happened in the past (1992: 90–119).⁵ Unlike historical recording, this form of remembering or commemoration is embodied, and as such it collapses the distance and the linearity that history introduces to time; juxtaposing the past and the present and returning a body of believers to the originary events of their faith from which the passage of time would divorce them. Nor does such commemoration necessarily entail a conservative outlook or a reactionary stance. Halbwachs makes the argument that memory serves the purpose of facilitating change in society – even revolution – by masking that change in the guise of continuity. Hence, old rites and religious customs often serve to give a sense of continuity and legitimacy to new political systems. Halbwachs observes that the patrician titles, ranks and manners of the feudal nobility in France were preserved even as the entire feudal system was being radically supplanted by a bureaucratic one. ‘In this way’, he tells us, ‘the new structure was elaborated in the shadow of the old…The new ideas became salient only after having for a long time behaved as if they were the old ones. It is upon a foundation of remembrances that contemporary institutions were constructed’ (1992: 125).

Halbwachs goes on to argue that in time, the memories that had been held by or attributed to the nobility were passed on to the bourgeoisie, and to society as a whole, which became the new repository of memory in a meritocratic, republican France. Halbwachs thus demonstrates that social practices or beliefs are also memories, and that it is because the contemporary or synchronic can also be seen from a diachronic point of view that it can be bathed in the hallowed aura of sanctity associated with the timeless and traditional. To the contention that rites and embodied practices are not memories because they serve only contemporary purposes and interests, Halbwachs responds that the apparent timelessness of ritual in fact conceals a chronology that makes the past essential to the negotiation of the present.⁶

Halbwachs' pioneering work on collective memory led to what we might term a democratisation of history and of memory (Bahloul 1996; Radstone and Hodgkin 2006: 2; Samuel 1994), in which some historians (especially those of the annales school) used Halbwachs' insights to suggest that not only the elite, but also ordinary people, the illiterate and the oppressed might be able to construct histories for themselves, and to act as the guardians and repositories of accepted forms of knowledge about the past. Accepting the voices of informants as valid sources, alongside ‘objective’ textual sources, signalled an ethnographic turn in history that was later paralleled by a historical turn in anthropology – a new preoccupation with memory which once again was concerned with establishing an alternative to histories seen to be too closely associated with patriarchal discourses of the state and practices of state formation.⁷

In anthropology and history alike then, an emphasis on memory and on oral history can be seen as an attempt to privilege voices that have been marginalised or silenced by projects of state–formation and empire building. Such a position can also implicitly be seen to privilege the subjective experience of individuals and communities over the ‘objective’ social and historical processes that elide individuals and their fallible and partial knowledge, experiences and beliefs. Additionally, the notion of counter–memories (Foucault 1977; Zemon–Davis and Stern 1989; cf. Baker 1994) points towards the continuous struggle between dominant and marginal voices in the production of history/memory. Where critics of the annales school would object that the latter's histories are based on anecdotes and hearsay and consequently lack analytical rigour and historical authority, advocates of the turn to memory would reply that orthodox historical approaches are needlessly positivistic in their insistence on ‘evidence’ and that their search for ‘facts’ as a means of shedding light on ‘what really happened’ is pursued at the cost of eliding the experience of ordinary people, which is ultimately the only historical fact that there is (see Wilson 2002).

As Jan Vansina (1985) has argued for Sub–Saharan Africa, one of the consequences of this turn to memory has been what one might term the de–textualisation of history and the replacement of often rather slender archives with more loquacious informants. As recognition has spread among historians that the past is not only encoded in written records and archival documents, but that it can also be remembered in oral history, oral tradition and other non–textual narratives and accounts, many peoples who were deemed in academia not to have a past worthy of the name were subsequently considered to be able to produce one, often in partnership with (Western) ethnographers.⁸

As an historian interested in supplementing his knowledge of ‘objective history’ by means of oral tradition, Vansina remains faithful to a conception of history in which the past and the memory thereof are assumed to correspond with each other unproblematically. However, others such as Joëlle Bahloul (1996), Ann Gold and Bhoju Ram Gujar (2002), Jean Comaroff (1985), Peter Geschiere (1997), John Peel (1979), Charles Piot (1999), Rosalind Shaw (2002), and Ann Stoler and Karen Strassler (2000) have been more interested in the ways in which the past can perdure and take on new life in the contemporary contexts into which it is recalled. Replacing the relatively static storage or ‘hydraulic’ model of memory (Stoler and Strassler 2000: 7) with a processual one enables us to see how memories are a source of negotiation and conflict in society, perpetually open to revision and effectively rendering past and present consubstantial (Wilce 2002: 159; Casey 1985: 254). Bridging between these two poles, Marita Sturken keeps a close eye on the historical veracity of the past in the collective memory of United States citizens while recognising its presence as a political force in the present. The title of her book Tangled Memories refers to her critique of Pierre Nora's opposition between memory and history. Memory and history are not opposed, she argues, but rather ‘entangled’ (1997: 4–7; cf. Cole 2001: 102–34).⁹

The interest in the social transformations to which memory is prone and in the political salience of the past in the present rather than in memory as a historical record is not restricted to the field of verbal accounts, but also finds its expression in the field of non–verbal, embodied memory. Indeed, while the bodily practices exhibited in rites, dance and everyday life are curiously gnomic with respect to the past they are associated with, they are undeniably powerful factors in the social relations of contemporary societies. Paul Connerton (1989) was among the first to address the importance of bodily practice in and for social memory. According to him, there are two dimensions to embodiment: on the one hand, he highlights the importance of ritual and ceremonial performances as commemorative acts which allow a community to reassure itself; on the other hand he refers to ‘habitual memory’ through which a ‘mnemonics of the body’ (1989: 74) finds its expression. What was once referred to as ‘bodily techniques’ (‘techniques du corps’, Mauss 1936) or as ‘habitus’ (Bourdieu 1990) becomes ‘memory’ in Connerton. David Berliner (2005b) has criticised this extension of the memory vocabulary for its uncritical convergence with problematic notions of culture as mainly concerned with continuity. Indeed, Connerton's interpretation of embodiment does not leave much room for a conceptualisation of memory which allows for social transformation. Yet if one considers the impact of violence on people's cultural and political identities, as do the authors of this volume, it becomes clear that embodied memory is not only relevant in terms of social stability, but perhaps even more so as an indicator of social disruption (cf. Argenti 2007; Shaw 2002; Stoller 1995; Kleinman and Kleinman 1994).

Trauma, Time and Counter–Time

Nietzsche, who says that ‘only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory’ (1899, in Sturken 1997: 15), also depicts the historical past as a dark invisible burden that travels with man, preventing him from living wholly in the present. For this reason, one must learn to forget the past in order to be able to act in the present (Nietzsche 1957: 5; see also White 1973: 347). Here, Nietzsche lays the foundation for a theory of memory and forgetting that pays particular attention to the importance of pain and suffering in the relationship between past and present, an aspect that would inspire and preoccupy later writers. As Maurice Bloch later put it, ‘the devices which select from the past what is to be remembered also inevitably involve selecting what of the past is to be obliterated’ (1996: 229). Two years after Bloch published his observations, Marc Augé developed this insight to its ultimate conclusion, radically challenging the notion that forgetting is a failure of memory, and arguing instead that it must be understood as constitutive of memory. In Augé's fitting and beautiful metaphor, ‘memories are crafted by oblivion as the outlines of the shore are created by the sea’ (2004: 20).¹⁰ James Wilce (2002) has added concrete data to these insights by revealing how the genre of lament is being systematically and wilfully forgotten in Bangladesh as a response to global modernity and Islamisation. If oblivion is part and parcel of memory in normal circumstances, however, its importance appears to be magnified by experiences of colonial domination and of political violence. Looking at the effect of violence on memory and oblivion, Laurence Kirmayer warns that ‘if a family or a community agrees that a trauma did not happen, then it vanishes from collective memory and the possibility for individual memory is severely strained’ (1996: 189–90).

Indeed, a good deal of the early psychological research on trauma, starting in the nineteenth century with that of Charcot, Erichsen, Freud and Janet amongst others on the victims of train accidents and shell shock, suggested that there was something about the individual experience of violence that placed it somehow outside of memory, beyond the normal processes of remembering.¹¹ According to this view, the psychic phenomenon of trauma itself engenders amnesia and silence. This view has been transmitted from early clinical theorists of trauma, through later generations of physicians such as Bessel van der Kolk (see van der Kolk and Grenberg 1987; van der Kolk and van der Hart 1991; van der Kolk and Fisler 1995; van der Kolk, McFarlane and Weisath 1996), to contemporary social scientists and literary critics, who have all dwelled on the silences and the aporia brought forth by violent pasts (cf. Agamben 1999; Bettelheim 1943; Caruth 1991a, 1991b, 1991c; Derrida 1976, 1986; Friedlander 1992; LaCapra 2001; Felman and Laub 1992; Laub 1991, 1992; Lyotard 1990; Unnold 2002; Vickroy 2002). According to this theory of traumatic silence, one of the paradoxes of trauma is that those who live through events of excessive violence seldom react to them emotionally at the time of their occurrence or in their immediate aftermath.

Janet and Freud's research in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century showed that some trauma patients became amnestic, believing – since they could not recall them – that the events that had caused their distress had never happened (van der Kolk and van der Hart 1991: 427). Others, while they remembered the horrific events they had lived through, reported a total lack of emotional connection to them.¹² And yet, Janet and Freud also noted that the traumatic experience clearly was present at some other level of consciousness, for, unaware as their patients were of the events that had precipitated their crises, they were compelled regularly to re–enact them with complete precision. Far from forgetting, these patients seemed to be suffering from the inability to forget, or the failure to realise they were perpetually remembering.

Following Janet, van der Kolk and van der Hart (ibid.) argue that familiar and expectable experiences are automatically assimilated without much conscious awareness, but frightening experiences may not fit in with one's cognitive schemata. The memories of these experiences are then stored differently and are not available for retrieval under normal circumstances. These memories become dissociated from conscious awareness and voluntary control. Fragments of these unintegrated experiences may later manifest themselves as behavioural re–enactments. According to van der Kolk and van der Hart, one of the characteristics of such embodied traumatic memories is that they ‘take too long’ (ibid.: 431): as long in fact as the original event that they reproduce integrally. Where narrative memory could describe an accident or crime in thirty seconds, traumatic memories last exactly as long as the events originally suffered – they are therefore to all intents and purposes nothing less than the return of the event.¹³ The second point about narrative memory, as opposed to re–enactment, is that its summative role necessarily introduces revisions, deletions, elisions and transformations to the original event, which are related rather than reproduced. These transformations introduce difference to an event, making it lose its original accuracy and completeness, but by the same token making the event amenable to the victim's psyche and to the social life of the community in which the retelling takes place. Thus, where narrative memories are integrative, traumatic memories are intrusive and literal; they have no social component, but rather seem to spring upon their victims quite outside of their volition or control.¹⁴

The amnestic nature of traumatic memory and its later involuntary intrusions and re–enactments points to another purported paradox of trauma: that it is never experienced as it happens, nor enters properly into the realm of experience, except, at times, after a protracted delay – often of decades. Hence, the division of the self to which Bruno Bettelheim attests is reported by many Holocaust survivors. Van der Kolk and van der Hart (ibid.: 437–38) argue on the basis of these reports that Freud's model of repression is too weak to describe the phenomenon, and they suggest instead a model of dissociation. The concept of repression suggests a voluntary or willed suppression of a memory that one possesses but wishes to ignore or forget. In the dissociation model, however, the causal event(s) never enter into consciousness as they happen, so they cannot later be repressed. The dissociation allegedly takes place as an inherent part of the original (non)experience of the event – it happens at the same time as the event as one of its effects, and is inseparable from it – it does not happen afterwards as the result of a decision.¹⁵ This suggests that while dissociative experiences may be subconscious, unlike the repressed, they may also dominate consciousness, for example during traumatic re–enactments. This clinical model happens to fit with the reports of many holocaust survivors, who attest to the experience of living in two different worlds simultaneously: the place and time of the trauma, and the place and time of their contemporary lives.

In his 1991 work, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory, Laurence Langer provides multiple and compelling examples of Holocaust survivors who perceive their lives – and often their bodies – as a duality. As the Auschwitz survivor Charlotte Delbo records in her memoir of the war, Auschwitz et Après, the camp exists for her in a perpetual present that produces a counter–time that impedes her normal progress through ‘ordinary’ time. In her film interview for the Yale Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, which Langer uses as part of his source material, Delbo is asked by one of her interviewers if she still lives with Auschwitz since her ‘liberation’ (a term that many survivors see as misleading given the psychological permanence and inescapability of the camps). She replies: ‘No – I live beside it. Auschwitz is there, fixed and unchangeable, but wrapped in the impervious skin of memory that segregates itself from the present me’ (Langer 1991: 5). Another informant who also passed through Auschwitz puts it very similarly: ‘I don't live with it [Auschwitz], it lives with me’ (Langer 1991: 23).¹⁶

For those such as Langer working within the trauma paradigm, the doubling of the self to which Charlotte Delbo and others refer entails the perpetual presence of a past that refuses to become memory, but remains forever that which it never fully was in the first instance: an experience. In Maurice Blanchot's words, the absent experiences of holocaust survivors ‘cannot be forgotten because [they] have always already fallen outside memory’ (1995: 38). Langer (1991: 95) speaks similarly of a ‘permanent duality’ or a ‘parallel existence’ in which survivors are doomed to dwell, and van der Kolk and van der Hart lend clinical weight to this interpretation of traumatic ellipsis and silence when they state that traumatic memory ‘is not transformed into a story, placed in time, with a beginning, a middle and an end’ (1991: 448).

In the realm of traumatic memory, the theory goes, the triggering events have taken place in a realm that is so utterly removed from any known set of ethics or values as to remain forever inconceivable in the terms of society outside the realm of the trauma – not only for those around the victim who escaped trauma, but even to the victims themselves insofar as they try to live lives predicated on taken–for–granted moral principles. This is, according to the PTSD model, one of the reasons for the initial silence of the first generation of victims of trauma. Nor are the incommensurable memories from these two realms totally separated in dissociation. Despite the testimonies of the Holocaust survivors and others, deep or traumatic memories and common memories become intertwined, or dialectically related to one another.¹⁷

In a preface written for Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok's work on Freud's Wolf Man case, Cryptonymie: le Verbier de l'Homme aux Loups, Derrida (1976) brings out the relationship of traumatic memory to common memory in all of its paradox when he refers to the realm of deep memory by analogy as a ‘crypt’, or a ‘forum’, a place hidden within or beneath another place, a place complete unto itself, but closed off from that outside itself of which it is nevertheless an inherent part. Derrida thus emphasises the simultaneous inclusion and exclusion of traumatic memory. The crypt is formed in violence, by violence, and yet also in silence. In order for this act of violence to remain silent and unheard, one places it as far as one can apart from oneself, but this place is in fact deep within oneself. The cryptic enclave thus becomes a space of incorporation rather than of introjection, as is the case with ‘normal’ experience and narrative memory. This failure of introjection, in other words, is at the root of a somatic embodiment of memory. It is parasitical, a sort of psychic cyst: ‘an inside heterogeneous to the inside of oneself’ (Derrida 1976: 15, trans. Nicolas Argenti).¹⁸ In the case of the death of close family members, the memory of the loved one may take up residence inside the crypt, forum, or for, where s/he will remain ‘safe’: ‘dead, safe (save) in me’ (Derrida 1976: 17).¹⁹ By means of incorporation, the dead thus become the living–dead inside oneself. Where introjection – progressive, slow, mediated, effective – fails, incorporation imposes itself – fantasmatic, immediate, unmediated, magical, sometimes hallucinatory (ibid). Lyotard (1990: 16), referring to traumatic memories as ‘unconscious affect’, similarly describes them as ‘a bit monstrous, unformed, confusing, confounding’. As the traumatic amnesia of events never experienced in the first place, traumatic memories are doomed to return only as experiences, and not as discursive memories – they can never be representations, but only presence. In other words, memory is not possible where there lies an absence of meaning, and it is not possible to give meaning to experiences of extreme violence.²⁰

Nicolas Abraham (1975) draws parallels between such incorporations and the experience of ghosts and ghostliness or haunting in Western culture. He likens ghosts to the effect identified as Nachträglichkeit by Freud, or latency: a core ‘symptom’ that has been repeatedly remarked upon in the literature on trauma across disciplines. Jean–Francois Lyotard (1990) brings out this aspect of Freud's research on trauma, again identifying the paradox of silence at the heart of the initial traumatic shock: it is a shock which is not experienced. This is not to say, however, that it is consigned to oblivion – that, psychically speaking, it never happened. We can say, rather, that it is encrypted, or entombed, within the subject. Far from being a mere absence, this crypt or tomb will come to influence the conscious life of the person – later.²¹

Following Freud, Lyotard describes Nachträglichkeit as a ‘double blow’: the first blow upsets the mind with such force that it cannot be registered. It is not (yet) meaning, but rather ‘dispersed’ and ‘undetermined’ (ibid.: 16). But what happened at the time of this first blow will be given at a later date: the second blow. This second blow is a ‘symptom’ of the first blow, but because it will be the first one to have been experienced, the second blow will have occurred ‘before’ what happened earlier, which can only come to be known through the second blow. Dori Laub (1991a) thus refers to psychic trauma as ‘a record that has yet to be made’, and Agamben has called the task of recording trauma ‘listening to something absent’ (1999: 13).

Of interest to our explorations in transgenerational transmission, ghosts are not laid to rest with those who create them (or in whom