The politics of the impossible: Memory and democratic practice

Drawing from sources ranging from Greek tragedy to contemporary literature and democratic theory, this thesis explores how a polity's relationship to the past effects what is possible for its unique and corresponding experiences of contemporary democracy. That is, I trace how the politics of memory shapes the directions and limits that govern democratic prospects. In the first chapter on Sophocles Antigone I establish the connection between memory, democracy and possibility. Since ancient Athens, democracy has required an intermingling of forgetting and remembering. On the one hand, amnesty (with its root word amnesia) appears as a precondition for democratic engagement free of violent retribution and division. On the other hand, inclusive public commemoration is integral to the very identity and continuity of the polis as a community of memory and shared possibility. In light of this tension, chapter two investigates what might be necessary for a genuinely democratic politics of memory by examining South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission in terms of the practices of memory theorized in Nietzsche's essay "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life." Theorizing the limits of conscious memory, the unconscious impact of America's slave past on its racial politics is the theme of a chapter on the segregation of memory in the United States. The violent histories that haunt the present without relying upon channels of conscious remembering in the work of Toni Morrison and James Baldwin make questionable the ways the past is viewed through the lens of the present and discloses how current power relations, imaginings of freedom, and democratic aspirations operate under the spell of historically inscribed, racialized assumptions and silences. The closing chapter examines Mexico's efforts to hold its past political leaders accountable for their role in the atrocities. With attention to the work of Jacques Derrida, I probe what might constitute a democratic relationship to time that exceeds the limits of de-historicized approaches to public questions. Advanced is a politics of memory better equipped to continually re-examine democracy's conscious and concealed exclusions, closures, and forgotten futures at precisely the moment when amnesiac policies appear as the only possibilities.