Why Should We Remember?
Yom Hashoah and the Impossible Possibility of Memory
Derrida was fond of paradoxes. One of my favorites is that forgiveness is only meaningful if what we forgive is “unforgivable.” Applying Derrida’s formula that “X is possible insofar as it is impossible” in other contexts yields vertiginous results.
Consider this one: We can remember the past only because it is impossible to do so. Were perfect recall possible it would be unnecessary. The past exists for us precisely because it doesn’t.
Of course, we can’t help but remember various events at various times in our lives. The elderly recall their childhood with greater vividness, as if different moments in time were folded along some line that connects them to other ones. Call this phenomenon involuntary memory.
But religious traditions also prescribe voluntary memory—a commitment to remember past events, to tell the story of one’s origins. The Jews are commanded to remember the Exodus from Egypt. In daily life, certain events stand out that we commit to remembering. Why?
Heidegger claims that all thinking is remembering; Plato, too, thought all knowledge recollection. But if remembrance is impossible, if the past exists precisely because it does not, then all thinking is a thinking of absence, all knowledge an acknowledgement of what eludes it.
Today is Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. George Steiner says the Shoah is fundamentally unintelligible. Only a few lines from Paul Celan’s poetry and some children’s drawings from Thereisenstadt, he says, can grant us access to the black box of what was. This, despite the hundreds of thousands of studies that pile up year after year.
Never Forget: the unique impossibility of remembrance we are granted by the past.
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