In a multidisciplinary work, Catherine Coquio shows that the contemporary cult of memory and truth in fact hides a crisis that prevents us from moving forward.
Catherine Coquio’s work allows us to think as a set of phenomena linked to each other of contemporary problems studied, usually, separately: our new relationship to individual and collective memory, the traumas of wars and recent genocides and the issues of truth which underlie the discourses of testimony.
In a sense, we have never remembered memory as much as in recent decades, that is to say, we lost it as a mode of social organization and a structure of temporal continuity, then reinvented within of a cultural model, such as heritage, commemoration, identity fantasy, nostalgia or antiques market. In Antiquity and again throughout the Middle Ages, the memory constituted both a social energy and an ontological fund of identities, social roles, modes of behavior of beings: it truly constituted a collective memory. Even more, it allowed access to the truth. However, modern times have reduced it to a secondary faculty of the human mind, criticizing its ancient social values under the names of habit, routine, obsolete and cumbersome tradition. Some, like the historian Pierre Nora, have recently seen the end of peasant ways of being with the First World War as the disappearance of the last pockets of this collective memory. The Great War in fact becomes the moment when we think more and more about the work of this collective memory, as if it resurfaced all the more in the news as it seemed to have disappeared from the ways of valuing the past. Particularly after the traumas of the two world wars and successive genocides, from that of the Armenians and the Jews to those of Rwanda and Cambodia, memory has regained collective importance while remaining based on a minefield: this revaluation of memory passes, in fact, through its cultural shaping (heritage is a good example: we freeze performances and memory updates in exemplary figures that we can at most visit as a tourist). However, at the same time, as the writer Imre Kertész said with his usual irony, “our era is that of truth”. The great merit of Evil of truth or the utopia of memory consists precisely in trying to think jointly about memory and truth, the relevance of traumas and the search for catharsis in a world marked by what Catherine Coquio, a specialist in the literature of testimony (particularly on mass crimes), calls the “Catastrophe”: “ a complex anthropological phenomenon resulting from a certain political operation: rupture of social bonds, brutal devaluation of life, alteration of the human figure or split of humanity, and in the aftermath impossible mourning, haunting of the truth” ( p.124). It is to the careful examination of this anthropological phenomenon that she devotes a rich and dense book.
At the origins of the evil of truth: lies
Taking from Jacques Derrida the expression of an “archive illness” which designates both the fact of suffering and the burning of a passion, Catherine Coquio knowingly modifies the situation by replacing the archive with the truth. Why would we be “starved for truth” today? Because of the lie. There is, in fact, a radical political lie which has, in some way, derealized History. This lie is the one that covered the genocides that marked the XXe century, or rather which added to the destruction of beings the destruction of the documents which testified to it: it is this “colossal lie” (and all the more seductive because it was colossal) that Adolf Hitler staged from 1925. This is why writing the history of these exterminations forces at the same time to bring to light and update the history of their negation. An event never exists alone by itself; it is filled with the traces that our eyes discover.
For Catherine Coquio, it is not a question of simply claiming immediate access to the truth to better counter such a lie and thus evade deconstructionist critiques of the truth or of giving up tracing the regimes of truth in an archeology of knowledge and power; it is a question of thinking the truth in the movement aroused by evil itself, of grasping the truth reached by this evil and of understanding how we are today in search of truth. The idea is that the crisis of memory, politics and testimony that we are experiencing above all testifies to an anthropological rupture whose effects must be measured. The thesis is therefore very broad. This is what motivates an investigation which crosses in its own way generally rather separate territories: law, sociology of collective memory, history, testimonies, newspapers and fictional stories, documentaries and films.
What truth to talk about?
As Catherine Coquio recalls, Hannah Arendt already believed that totalitarianism had attacked not the truths of reason, but the truths of fact by reducing them to opinions on what had happened: stamped with the opaque seal of contingency, the truths of fact became problems for the librarian. However, we must distinguish, as Catherine Coquio does, “truth-veracity” (which concerns precisely the possible verification of documents) and “truth-equity” (resulting from a reconstruction which allows the issues to be problematized, as by example that of Chalamov with the Stories from Kolyma). All these truths must be able to be heard even in their possible conflictuality. Memoirs and testimonies are essential to be able to hear them.
However, we can also be wary of this kind of memory drive and the overkill of testimonies. For Catherine Coquio, they appear together when mass crimes arouse a desire for truth accompanying “the collapse of the authority of reality”. It would then be necessary to be able to associate, in a fair use of testimony, loss of authority and critical transmission. Transmission would not recover what was lost, but provide access to it differently, even into uncertainty. Perhaps then we see the transmission of truth being reversed into the truth of transmission. This “truth without authority” is no less truth because it stumbles over its mediations. It only forces one to imagine, at the same time as one’s performance, the appropriate public places to seek it out and, above all, to express it. Precisely because its original place of enunciation is problematic, the ways of listening to it are crucial. This requires tactical work where the mediations of research and exposure of the truth must be thought of in relation to senders and recipients. We could thus say that, beyond the need for remembrance, the intellectual “advantage” of writing the history of mass crimes is the need to recognize that the truth is exposed: put before our eyes even in its fragility .
We therefore understand why Catherine Coquio analyzes at length the logic of testimony: truth takes the form of a necessary content of knowledge in relation to a linguistic enunciation, but it must also appear as a “life value engaging a word”. Cognitive aspect of attestation and ethical aspect of incarnation come together. Without strictly following Michel Foucault, this roughly corresponds to what he called truth-proof and truth-test. However, the problem also lies in the fact that this double dimension of truth must articulate the general scope of the cognitive which is established on documents and the singular anchoring of ethics which makes a presentation credible. Known problem of the transition from the singular to the general which plays a new role here because the truth-document, in the case of mass crimes and the truth essential to transmit, also makes it a truth-monument. Catherine Coquio rightly notes that we are changing the regime of address here: the contract of trust in truth is coupled with an act of faith in a singular word which reports events, by definition for crimes of this kind, incredible.
Testimony and fiction
The examination of these disturbances of truth-testimony leads Catherine Coquio to see how a “culture of memory” appeared in the wake of the First World War, and how this culture of memory is linked to a critique of culture (by re-examining the legacy of the Frankfurt School). The author especially insists on the ways of thinking about the witness, and even this variant which has become established: “the witness of a witness” (using Celan’s famous verse). We thus try to reconnect with memorial heritages, but this can also lead to a certain religiosity of the link and of this community of witnesses, sometimes obscuring access to the very texts of testimonies, traces and their possible critical use. Because testimony, up to mass crimes, had the function of producing truth; it is now also assigned to the need to justify mourning and transmit a debt. It is here that Catherine Coquio suggests returning to the notion of utopia: not as a principle of hope, but as work on the literal absence of place, on the borders of existence. As Sylvie Umubieyi, a Tutsi survivor, quoted in the work, said: “When I think about the genocide, I think about where to put it in existence, but I can’t find any place. »
It is then that the exploration of the boundaries of language and life that fiction allows opens onto this utopian dimension. Both Chalamov and Kertész insisted on it. Catherine Coquio carefully follows its necessarily sinuous characters. Including texts dealing with the Armenian genocide which have been rather neglected until now (for example In these dark days by Aram Andonian). Another notion that she reworks in connection with fiction, that of catharsis which links memory, mourning and the told truth, thus allocating to the truth a restorative function. However, if the “true” deliverance remains undecidable, the important thing here is to grasp at least the dimension of appeal, structuring the chosen forms of testimony.
An educational work?
Rithy Panh, Cambodian documentary filmmaker and author of S21 The Khmer Rouge Death Machinelooks back on his family experience of the genocide in The Missing Image. However, he recognizes that he believes “in pedagogy more than in justice” (quoted by C. Coquiop. 250). His camera is not a court. This is undoubtedly why Catherine Coquio proposes a “critical philology freed from humanist equivocation” (p. 273). She herself deploys certain possibilities in her way of crossing the most varied works, whether philosophical, historical, cinematographic or literary (Nancy or Lanzmann, Nora or Derrida, Nichanian or Ginzburg) and of resituating certain controversies in the process. or theoretical positions taken over the last thirty years. This results in a dense work, of which we could criticize the sometimes too rapid nature, if we did not feel in this very speed a way of also conveying to us a feeling of urgency.
The nature of a fever is to signal and fight against an illness, likewise the illness of truth, which Catherine Coquio examines closely, underlines a fundamental element of the modern conception of human beings: we would originally be caught in relationships of predation which would then allow us to understand contemporary massacres and genocides. But where does this truth of predation come from? Two elements, it seems to me: the conception of humans as beings of desire and the way of believing them to be driven solely by their individual interests. Indeed, from the moment when humans are thought of from their equal power to desire and this desire is immediately translated into the logic of interest, there is hardly any other outcome than to see each among us driven essentially by an impulse to dominate or appropriate the property of others. We must hope for a continuation of the investigation which will also allow us to re-examine these “truths” which are all the more painful as they perhaps in turn relate to another lie.